tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83335282018-02-02T16:36:30.800-08:00Rite Wing TechnoPaganNot quite a Ronald Reagan, Carl Sagan, San Diegan Pagan, since I live in Los Angeles.Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.comBlogger5511125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-55507760387006276652017-11-11T09:32:00.001-08:002017-11-11T09:34:28.052-08:00Gibson's Bakery sues Oberlin College over racial profiling accusations, Oberlin cuts business ties<a href="https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/11/gibsons-bakery-sues-oberlin-college-over-racial-profiling-accusations-oberlin-cuts-business-ties/">Gibson's Bakery sues Oberlin College over racial profiling accusations, Oberlin cuts business ties</a><br />
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The folks at Gibson's Bakery caught some Oberlin College students shoplifting. They turned them over to the police, and all three subsequently plead guilty.<br />
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Because of this, they're accused of racial profiling.<br />
So I'm guessing the students were not white. Or Asian, for that matter.<br />
<br />Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-4134787282994045132017-11-10T12:31:00.001-08:002017-11-11T09:55:05.727-08:00Freeman Dyson on ‘heretical’ thoughts about global warmimg | Watts Up With That?<div class="tr_bq">
<a href="https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/10/freeman-dyson-on-heretical-thoughts-about-global-warmimg/">Freeman Dyson on ‘heretical’ thoughts about global warmimg | Watts Up With That?</a></div>
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My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak.<br />
But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.<br />
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-64666128563606272622017-10-09T15:06:00.001-07:002017-10-09T15:11:00.825-07:00Fascism’s Karl Marx: Man the left doesn’t want you to meet<a href="http://mobile.wnd.com/2017/08/fascisms-karl-marx-man-the-left-doesnt-want-you-to-meet/">Fascism’s Karl Marx: Man the left doesn’t want you to meet</a><br />
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<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>For fascism, the State and the individual are one.</i> – Giovanni Gentile, “Origin and Doctrine of Fascism”</blockquote>
The myth that fascism and Nazism are phenomena of the right relies heavily on Americans not knowing what fascism and Nazism really mean, what those ideologies stand for. Leftists in academia and the media have worked hard to portray fascism and Nazism in terms of sheer demagoguery and generic authoritarianism, carefully concealing the ideological roots that would reveal fascism and Nazism’s true political colors. <br />
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Think about this: We know the name of the philosopher of capitalism, Adam Smith. We also know the name of the philosopher of Marxism, Karl Marx. So, quick: What is the name of the philosopher of fascism? Yes, exactly. You don’t know. Virtually no one knows. This is not because he doesn’t exist, but because the political left – which dominates academia, the media and Hollywood – had to get rid of him to avoid confronting fascism and Nazism’s unavoidable leftist orientation. <br />
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So let’s meet the man himself, Giovanni Gentile, who may be termed fascism’s Karl Marx. Gentile was, in his day, which is the first half of the 20th century, considered one of Europe’s leading philosophers. A student of Hegel and Bergson and director of the Encyclopedia Italiana, Gentile was not merely a widely published and widely influential thinker; he was also a political statesman who served in a variety of important government posts. How, then, has such a prominent and influential figure vanished into the mist of history? <br />
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Let’s consider some key aspects of Gentile’s philosophy. Following Aristotle and Marx, Gentile argues that man is a social animal. This means that we are not simply individuals in the world. Rather, our individuality is expressed through our relationships: we are students or workers, husbands or wives, parents and grandparents, members in this or that association or group and also citizens of a community or nation. To speak of man alone in the state of nature is a complete fiction; man is naturally at home in community, in society. <br />
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Right away, we see that Gentile is a communitarian as opposed to a radical individualist. This distinguishes him from some libertarians and classical liberals, who emphasize individuality in contradistinction to society. But Gentile so far has said nothing with which conservatives – let’s say Reaganite conservatives – would disagree. Reagan in 1980 emphasized the importance of five themes: the individual, the family, the church, the community and the country. He accused the centralized state – big government – of undermining not merely our individuality but also these other associations. “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left,” Dinesh D’Souza’s stunning new explanation of what makes the the leftists in America tick, is now available at the WND Superstore. <br />
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Gentile now contrasts two types of democracy that he says are “diametrically opposed.” The first is liberal democracy, which envisions society made up of individuals who form communities to protect and advance their rights and interests, specifically their economic interests in property and trade. Gentile regards this as selfish or bourgeois democracy, by which he means capitalist democracy, the democracy of the American founding. In its place, Gentile recommends a different type of democracy, “true democracy,” in which individuals willingly subordinate themselves to society and to the state. <br />
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Gentile recognizes that his critique of bourgeois democracy echoes that of Marx, and Marx is his takeoff point. Like Marx, Gentile wants the unified community, a community that resembles the family, a community where we’re all in this together. I’m reminded here of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s keynote address at the 1984 Democratic Convention. Cuomo likened America to an extended family where, through the agency of government, we take care of each other in much the same manner that families look out for all their members. <br />
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While Marx and Cuomo seem to view political communities as natural, inevitable associations, Gentile emphasized that such communities must be created voluntarily, through human action, operating as a consequence of human will. They are, in Gentile’s words, an idealistic or “spiritual creation.” For Gentile, people by themselves are too slothful and inert to form genuine communities by themselves; they have to be mobilized. Here, too, many modern progressives would agree. Speaking in terms with which both Obama and Hillary would sympathize, Gentile emphasized that leaders and organizers are needed to direct and channel the will of the people. <br />
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Despite Gentile’s disagreement with Marx about historical inevitability, he has at this point clearly broken with modern conservatism and classical liberalism and revealed himself to be a man of the left. Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist. Like Marx, he viewed socialism as the sine qua non of social justice, the ultimate formula for everyone paying their “fair share.” For Gentile, fascism is nothing more than a modified form of socialism, a socialism arising not merely from material deprivation but also from an aroused national consciousness, a socialism that unites rather than divides communities. Check out all of Dinesh D’Souza’s smash hits at the WND Superstore! <br />
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Gentile also perceived socialism emerging out of revolutionary struggle, what the media today terms “protest” or “activism.” Revolutionaries, Gentile says, must be ready to disregard conventional rules and they must be willing to use violence. Gentile seems to be the unacknowledged ancestor of the street activism of Antifa and other leftist groups. “One of the major virtues of fascism,” he writes, “is that it obliged those who watched from the windows to come down into the street.” <br />
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For Gentile, private action should be mobilized to serve the public interest, and there is no distinction between the private interest and the public interest. Correctly understood, the two are identical. Gentile argued that society represents “the very personality of the individual divested of accidental differences … where the individual feels the general interest as his own and wills therefore as might the general will.” In the same vein, Gentile argued that corporations too should serve the public welfare and not just the welfare of their owners and shareholders. <br />
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Society and the state – for Gentile, the two were one and the same. Gentile saw the centralized state as the necessary administrative arm of society. Consequently, to submit to society is to submit to the state, not just in economic matters, but in all matters. Since everything is political, the state gets to tell everyone how to think and also what to do – there is no private sphere unregulated by the state. And to forestall resistance to the state, Gentile argued that the government should act not merely as a lawmaker but also a teacher, using the schools to promulgate its values and priorities. <br />
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“All is in the state and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.” Mussolini said that, in the Dottrina del fascismo, one of the doctrinal statements of early fascism, but Gentile wrote it or, as we may say today, ghost wrote it. Gentile was, as you have probably figured by now, the leading philosopher of fascism. “It was Gentile,” Mussolini confessed, “who prepared the road for those like me who wished to take it.” <br />
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Gentile served as a member of the Fascist Grand Council, a senator in the Upper House of Parliament, and also as Mussolini’s minister of education. Later, after Mussolini was deposed and established himself in the northern Italian province of Salo, Gentile became, at il Duce‘s request, the president of the Italian Academy. In 1944, Gentile was accosted in his apartment by members of a rival leftist faction who shot him at point-blank range. <br />
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Gentile’s philosophy closely parallels that of the modern American left. Consider the slogan unveiled by Obama at the 2012 Democratic Convention: “We belong to the government.” That apotheosis of the centralized state is utterly congruent with Gentile’s thinking. Only Gentile would have provided a comprehensive philosophical defense that the Democrats didn’t even attempt. In many respects, Gentile provides a deeper and firmer grounding for modern American progressivism than anyone writing today. <br />
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John Rawls, widely considered a philosophical guru of modern progressivism, seems like thin gruel compared to Gentile in offering an intellectual rationale for ever-expanding government control over the economy and our lives. While Rawls feels abstract and dated now, Gentile seems to speak directly to leftist activists in the Democratic Party, in the media, and on campus. <br />
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One might naively expect the left, then, to embrace and celebrate Gentile. This, of course, will never happen. The left has the desperate need to conceal fascism’s deep association with contemporary leftism. Even when the left uses Gentile’s rhetoric, its source can never be publicly acknowledged. That’s why the progressives intend to keep Gentile where they’ve got him, dead, buried and forgotten. <br />
<br />
<i>“The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left,” Dinesh D’Souza’s stunning new explanation of what makes the the leftists in America tick, is now available at the WND Superstore.</i> </blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-24092857941259168822017-07-20T10:22:00.001-07:002017-11-11T10:34:28.724-08:00The Latest ‘Hate’ Smear Target Is a Civil-Rights Group - WSJ<div class="tr_bq">
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-latest-hate-smear-target-is-a-civil-rights-group-1500500854">The Latest ‘Hate’ Smear Target Is a Civil-Rights Group - WSJ</a></div>
<br />
SPLC Watch<br />
<br />
Ed Meese III:<br />
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<blockquote>
The headlines were both inflammatory and untrue: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions Criticized for Speaking to ‘Hate Group,’&nbsp;”<a class="icon none" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-criticized-speaking-hate-group-n782356" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">reported</a>&nbsp;NBC. Reports&nbsp;<a class="icon none" href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jeff-sessions-addresses-anti-lgbt-hate-group-doj/story?id=48593488" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: initial; color: #0080c3; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">from ABC&nbsp;</a>and other major news outlets used similar language. Readers might be surprised to learn that the group in question is the Alliance Defending Freedom, a respected civil-rights law firm.<br />
<br />
So where did this scurrilous charge originate? With the Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels the ADF a “hate group.” The designation had nothing to do with the law firm’s policies or behavior. It’s just that the SPLC objects to its traditional views on the Constitution, the First Amendment and the meaning of marriage. No responsible media outlet should parrot the SPLC’s hate list without seeking to understand not only its motives but also the consequences of spreading false charges.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-81356282461407717702017-07-16T13:15:00.001-07:002017-11-11T10:00:08.617-08:00Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition 2017 Edition | Mercatus Center<a href="https://www.mercatus.org/statefiscalrankings">Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition 2017 Edition | Mercatus Center</a><br />
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I'm in the 43rd ranked state.<br />
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<br />Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-25922481587652014172017-07-16T13:05:00.001-07:002017-07-16T13:13:24.577-07:00The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417899/it-isnt-legacy-slavery-caused-social-breakdown-ghetto-communities-thomas-sowell">| National Review</a><br />
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<blockquote>
Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.
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Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
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<br />
In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?
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<br />
When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of “us against them” that was more popular.
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<br />
That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a “legacy of slavery” in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.
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<br />
The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.
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<br />
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.
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You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
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<br />
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
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Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
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<br />
Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.
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You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
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Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.
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<br />
One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-21902988619985511122017-07-15T09:53:00.000-07:002017-07-15T10:55:51.894-07:00SPLC WatchThis is a post where I'm going to collect bits about the Southern Poverty Law Center as I find them, because in many cases, I'm having trouble finding them again.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449476/splc-dangerous-lies-alliance-defending-freedom-no-hate-group">http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449476/splc-dangerous-lies-alliance-defending-freedom-no-hate-group</a><br />
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<blockquote>
<blockquote>
Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a speech to an alleged hate group at an event closed to reporters on Tuesday night, but the Department of Justice is refusing to reveal what he said.<br />
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Sessions addressed members of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was designated an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016, at the Summit on Religious Liberty at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, in Dana Point, California.</blockquote>
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I’m at that summit right now. I heard the attorney general’s speech, I delivered a speech myself, and I’m even now sitting right next to friends and former colleagues at ADF listening to a lecture on censorship in the European Union. Let me give you a peek under the curtain. I’ll let you in on the major themes of the week.<br />
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We heard from men and women who’ve long served gay customers and formed lasting friendships with gay neighbors who now face death threats because they simply refused to lend their artistic talents to celebrate a gay wedding. We heard one man’s voice break as he told the story of how his father fought across Europe and helped liberate a concentration camp from Nazi control — and now his son is called a “Nazi” in part because he wants all people to enjoy the same rights of conscience and wants no man or woman to be coerced into supporting events they find immoral.<br />
<br />
....<br />
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Let’s be clear. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the “civil rights watchdog group” that ABC and NBC so prominently cite, has become a dangerous joke. It’s a joke because the very idea that Christians are members of a “hate group” merely because they advocate for orthodox Christian principles and the liberty to live those principles is so intellectually and ideologically bankrupt that it’s barely worth addressing.<br />
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Indeed, I’d encourage you to read the SPLC’s information page on the Alliance Defending Freedom. It consists of a collection of quotes where ADF attorneys explain the implications of an unrestrained sexual revolution on religious liberty, and it details how ADF files cases to protect the First Amendment rights of its clients. That’s it. No violence. No hate. Mere Christianity.</blockquote>
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And this will be dismissed out of hand because it's Accuracy In Media:<br />
<a href="http://www.aim.org/aim-column/southern-poverty-law-center-belongs-on-southern-policy-law-centers-hate-list/">http://www.aim.org/aim-column/southern-poverty-law-center-belongs-on-southern-policy-law-centers-hate-list/</a><br />
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<blockquote>
Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Jack Phillips, the cake baker who declined to create a cake for a gay wedding and whose case the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear.<br />
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It pushed the case that forced public schools to provide equal access to after-school Bible clubs as to other organizations. And it convinced the Supreme Court to affirm an Arizona tuition tax credit program could be used for any schools parents choose, including those run by churches.<br />
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It got the court to affirm the rights of communities to restrict where sexually oriented businesses could locate. And it was the group behind the Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on partial-birth abortions.<br />
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One can take issue with any or all these positions. But they are the positions of a Christian group, founded by preachers, that makes grants or provides pro bono attorneys to groups and individuals whose religious rights and rights to free association are threatened. They are not the positions of a hate group.<br />
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So how did this group end up in a thousand headlines proclaiming it a “hate group?” Because the Southern Poverty Law Center said so. And for the left and its handmaidens in the media, that’s all it takes.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-50549448607833928002017-07-12T19:16:00.001-07:002017-07-12T19:18:55.343-07:00Slavery and Islam - Part 1: The Problem of Slavery | Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research<a href="https://yaqeeninstitute.org/en/jonathan-brown/the-problem-of-slavery/">Slavery and Islam - Part 1: The Problem of Slavery | Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research</a><br />
<br />
A lecture that has evoked some controversy, because of <a href="https://mystudentvoices.com/georgetown-professor-jonathan-defends-defends-slavery-as-moral-and-rape-as-normal-in-virginia-3c0aac65dd41">this article</a> <br />
<blockquote>
Is there slavery in Islam? When people pose this question they usually assume it’s the Islam part that needs clarification. Everyone already knows what slavery is. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. The Islam part is relatively straightforward. The real problem is trying to pin down what we mean by slavery. The more we scratch the surface of that word and try to define its reality, the more we find that our assumptions and even our words fail us. What we think we mean by slavery means little outside our own American experience, and the moment we try to fix what slavery is as a human phenomenon we find a hall of mirrors reflecting our own assumptions back at us. We all think we know what slavery is, but would we really know slavery if we saw it?<br />
We all think we know what #slavery is, but would we really know slavery if we saw it?…<br />
<br />
Imagine we could explore the phenomenon of slavery throughout history. Imagine that, as huge Doctor Who fans, we hitch a ride in the Tardis, which allows us to travel across space and time. Our first stop is an exotic, desert land where slavery is common. We visit a well-off home, where we find certain people performing domestic work while an older man sits drinking tea. Everyone has the same dark skin color. Suddenly the lounging tea-drinker shouts at a young man serving him and smacks him hard with a fly swatter. We are eager to know who all these people are. Fortunately, the TARDIS translates all languages directly to your brain. We ask one of the men serving tea his name, and he says his name is Saffron and that he is “One of the delicate folk” working in the household. He has worked in this house for five years, but he tells us that, in one year’s time, he’ll have saved enough money to move on and start his own teashop. We ask about the young man getting smacked. “Oh, that poor boy… he’ll be here till the old man dies.”<br />
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Back in the TARDIS, we voyage on through time and space, this time to meet the powerful prime minister of an expansive empire. The prime minister enters the throne room surrounded by dozens of armed soldiers, and we sense the trepidation in the hushed muttering of the audience around us. One voice whispers,“The minister is worth 80 million gold ducats.” “He’s married to the king’s daughter,” responds another. The minister and his bodyguards are all light skinned and fair-haired. Many of those there to offer petitions and seek favor have a darker, olive complexion.<br />
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After meeting the minister we voyage on, now to a colder land where we meet a man working in a clock factory. He hates his life, so we agree to take him with us. But the factory owner catches him leaving, and the man is thrown in prison.<br />
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We voyage still onward in the TARDIS to a new land where, passing down the road, we see a crew of dark-skinned youths clearing brush in the hot sun, their legs shackled and all joined by chains. A light skinned man watches over them with a weapon in hand.<br />
<br />
Where has the TARDIS taken us in our exploration of slavery? The first place we visited was the city of Mecca in the 1400’s. The ‘soft and delicate (raqīq)’ man Saffron was a slave in the wealthy man’s household who had an agreement with his master to buy back his freedom on installments (mukataba). Raqīq was the standard term for slave, and epicurean names like Saffron were typical. The younger man being smacked for bad service, who was tied to the household seemingly forever, was the wealthy man’s own son.<br />
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The second place we visited was the capital of the Ottoman Empire in 1579. The minister was Sokollu Mehmet Pasha, the grand vizier and de facto ruler of the empire during the time of three sultans. At the time of our visit, he had already been one of the empire’s richest and most powerful men for almost two decades. He was also a slave of the sultan. He was born in Bosnia, as were all his guards, who were also slaves of the sultan.[1]<br />
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The land where we met the man working in a clock factory was England in 1860. Although the worker was a free man, according to labor laws in England at the time a worker who failed to show up for work was guilty of stealing from his employer and was tried and sentenced as a criminal. Finally, the last place we visited was a land in which slavery had long been illegal: rural Arizona in 2004, where the local sheriff was overseeing a juvenile chain gang.<br />
<br />
The Problem of Defining \ˈslā-v(ə-)rē\<br />
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How would we know who’s a slave and who isn’t on our voyage? Most Westerners today would probably think that the young man being smacked and the chained laborers were slaves, because we associate slavery with physical degradation, harsh labor and violence. We would probably not assume the ‘soft and delicate’ man was a slave because he told us he would soon move to another job on his own terms, while we associate slavery with a total loss of agency, presumably for life. We would certainly not presume that the minister was a slave, since he clearly wielded immense wealth and the power over life and death throughout an empire.<br />
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If we are searching for the phenomenon of slavery, what are we really looking for? Is it the label ‘slave’ that matters? Or is it the reality of the condition behind it? The soldiers and administrators of China’s Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912) were technically slaves (aha) of the dynasty and proudly referred to themselves as such. This title slave was later applied to anyone of Manchu descent in Qing China. But the word had no link to the reality of any servile condition.[2] Up through the 1800’s, the upper administration of the Ottoman Empire was in the hands of people technically classified as kul (a privileged sultanic slave) who had more power and esteem than their free counterparts.[3]<br />
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When we come across a word that translates as ‘slave’ in English, does that word necessarily mean what we mean by slavery? Our word slave in English comes from the Medieval Latin word for Slavic peoples, Sclavus, since they were the population in the Balkans from which European slave traders drew their cargo up through the thirteenth century.[4] A common English dictionary definition of a slave is ‘someone who is legally owned by another person and is forced to work for that person without pay.’ This notion of slavery as reducing human beings to things owned by other people has been a major theme in how the concept has been understood in the West. It was crucial to how abolitionists understood slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the movement to end slavery began. But the roots of this definition go further back to the roots of Western heritage. They lie in Roman law, which divided people into two categories: the free (a free person has the ‘natural right’ to ‘do as he pleases, unless prevented by the force of law’) and slaves, who exist as the property of others.<br />
Definition of a slave is someone who is legally owned by another person &amp; is forced to work…<br />
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But even defining slavery through concepts like ownership and exploitation leaves more questions than answers. What does ownership mean? In American law we think of ownership as a ‘bundle of rights’: the rights to use, exclude, destroy and sell off. Sometimes an owner has some of them, often with significant restrictions, and sometimes the owner has them all. We would probably not think of kids ‘owning’ their toys, since they are clearly not in control of them (ideally!). But children in America legally do ‘own’ the toys we give them. But their ownership is not complete, since their right to use them is highly restricted by their parents. <br />
Definition of a slave is someone who is legally owned by another person &amp; is forced to work…<br />
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Ownership is as much about how we imagine relationships as exercising real control. As the famous social historian Orlando Patterson points out, who and what we say we own is really only a matter of our customs and manners.[5] Modern Americans would gasp at the notion of ‘owning’ their children, but from the Roman through the medieval period in Europe parents could and did sell their children off as slaves to creditors in order to pay debts. Moreover, poor parents abandoning their children was a regular source for slave markets in Europe.[6] Yet all these children started off as technically ‘free’ in the legal sense, not legally owned by anyone. In the US, wives and husbands have numerous claims on and powers over each other and their labor, as becomes clear during divorce.[7] But we would never speak about marriage as a relationship of ownership. Conventions in early imperial China were different. There, husbands regularly listed their (free!) wives as property in their will, bequeathing them to some friend.[8] Astoundingly, between 1760 and 1880 –less than a century and a half ago – there were 218 cases of Englishmen holding auctions to sell off their wives, even advertising this in the newspaper.[9]<br />
Ownership is as much about how we imagine relationships as exercising real control.…<br />
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What would it mean to ‘own’ a person? Does it mean to have total control over them? We have full control over our young children, but, unlike a chair or a pen, we cannot seriously physically harm them without legal consequence. In fact, this distinction between ownership and control is not very helpful for defining slavery. As with our children today, it was impermissible for Muslims to kill or seriously injure their slaves, and those who did faced legal consequences under the Shariah. In some contexts, ownership might fail completely as a concept for understanding slavery. Slavery existed in imperial China, but it was not conceptualized through ownership. Slaves were not legally ‘owned’ at all for the very technical reason that Chinese law could not categorize people as ‘things.’[10]<br />
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Slaves were not legally ‘owned’ for the very technical reason that Chinese law could not…<br />
If we think about slavery as exploitation, does slavery mean not compensating someone for their labor? Sokollu Mehmet Pasha was a slave ‘owned’ by the Ottoman sultan, but he was also paid handsomely for his work as grand vizier. Saffron was owned by his master, but only partially, since he had already bought back a portion of his freedom through wages he earned elsewhere in his time off. He received no pay from his master, but the master paid for his food, clothes and shelter. Incidentally, in this regard the slave was no different from the master’s own son. Both were his dependents, relying on his support for their basic needs.<br />
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We usually think of slavery as something that exists in a dichotomy with freedom. But what does freedom mean? As the legal scholar Vaughan Lowe jibes, inverting Rousseau’s famous line about man’s natural state of freedom, “Man is born in chains, but everywhere he thinks himself free.”[11] Almost no human being is free of dependence on others and on society as a whole. Almost everyone is forced to work in order to earn wages to buy food. The son in the household we visited in Mecca was technically free, but he depended on his father for all his support and had to obey him or face his anger. If he fled his home to get away from his nasty father, he’d be ostracized by all those he knew and loved. The man’s slave, meanwhile, had evenings off to earn his own money and would soon be free of his master. Who was free in this situation?<br />
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At a theoretical level, how we understand freedom in the West is inherited from Classical Greece and Rome, where ‘free’ was the legal category of citizens of a democratic republic. A free person is autonomous, at liberty to do whatever he or she wants unless the law prohibits it. Everyone else is a slave. But even in Classical times this legal definition of freedom was no more than a “rhetorical argument,” as one scholar puts it, since in reality few people in the Greek and Roman world were ‘free’ by this definition. Almost everyone was constrained by powerful social, economic and even legal bonds.[12] Ironically, even in theory this notion of freedom only applies in liberal democracies. In autocracies – perhaps a majority of societies in human history – almost no one is free by this definition.[13]<br />
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Nor does freedom exist on a single plane. It is often relational, expanding or contracting depending on the relationship in question. In the ancient and medieval Mediterranean world (both Europe and Islamic civilization), a slave’s intense subordination was not absolute. He or she was subordinated to his or her master, not to society as a whole. So Roman and later Byzantine masters used slaves to run their shops and to be the public faces of their businesses, negotiating and arguing with countless ‘free’ customers and contractors on a daily basis.[14] The slave was not the lowest rung on the ladder in the streets of Rome or Constantinople/Istanbul. If their master was a powerful or wealthy person, the slave enjoyed the status of that connection in public life. The status of the slave depended on the status of his or her master.<br />
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In Rome's &amp; Constantinople's streets, the status of a slave depended on the status of their…<br />
How We See Slavery – American Chattel Slavery<br />
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By now you should see that any question about slavery is very complicated. One of the biggest challenges that historians and anthropologists interested in slavery face is whether there is even some single institution of slavery that exists across time and space that they can even study.[15] It’s tempting to assume that, though the details might differ, there is something called slavery out there, popping up throughout history, and that we’d know it if we saw it. But, of course, as our hypothetical trip in the TARDIS shows, what we would recognize as slavery is determined by our own cultural memory of what the English word \ˈslā-v(ə-)rē\ means to us.<br />
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When Americans think of slavery we think of Twelve Years A Slave and Roots. The images are seared marks in our mind: African men, women and children being seized by ruthless slave traders, torn from their homes and each other, packed like chattel into the holds of stifling slave ships, sold like cattle at auction to white plantation owners, who worked, oppressed and lashed them mercilessly for the rest of their lives. Slavery in our cultural memory is ‘the original sin’ of America: the reduction of a person, against their will, to the status of property, owned by another person who had absolute right over their labor and who deprived them of the natural right to freedom and family.<br />
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The Spectrum of Coerced Labor<br />
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Yet as we have seen, ownership, freedom and exploitation come in shades of gray. They exist on spectrums. Historians and sociologists have attempted to delineate categories on this spectrum, in part to determine if we can really talk about slavery as something separate from other forms of forced labor or involuntary servitude. The main categories on this ‘continuum of dependency’ other than slavery are:[16]<br />
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In Rome's &amp; Constantinople's streets, the status of a slave depended on the status of their…<br />
Serfdom: In Europe, this tradition goes back to ancient Greece. Laborers, usually peasant farmers, were free in the sense that they owned their own clothes, tools, livestock as well as the fruits of their labor. But they were bound to the land on which they lived or to their landlord wherever he might go.[17] Serfdom in Europe developed as the status of free peasants and settled Barbarian prisoners of war in the late Roman Empire collapsed into a single class of “quasi-servitude” not too different from slavery.[18] Serfdom disappeared in most of Western Europe in the wake of the Black Death in the 1300s, though it continued in the institution of villeinage in England until around 1600 and continued into the 1800s in mining areas of Scotland and German speaking lands. Serfdom is most associated with Russia, where it came to replace slavery in agriculture and domestic spheres in the late 1600s and early 1700s.[19]<br />
Master/Servant Relationship: When serfdom disappeared from Western Europe, it was replaced by the relationship between the laborer and the landowner/employer. Unlike our modern notion of a worker’s contract, however, failing to live up to this contract was a criminal offense. Only in the British colonies in North America did a notion of free labor eventually appear in the 1700s, and this did not make its way back to Britain until 1875.[20]<br />
Debt servitude: This has been one of the most widespread forms of coerced labor. When a person is unable to repay a debt, he or she becomes the slave of the creditor. This was extremely common in Southeast Asia, where our Western model of slavery was extremely rare.[21]<br />
Bonded labor/indentured servitude: This is similar to debt servitude and has been very common in history. A person willingly enters into an agreement to exchange their labor and a loss of some freedoms for a fixed period of time in return for some service or up-front payment. This differs from debt servitude because the person willingly surrenders their labor and a degree of freedom.<br />
These categories are not fixed or hermetically sealed. They bleed into each other, making it very hard to come up with a clear line distinguishing slavery from other forms of coerced labor. Scottish mining serfs often wore collars with the names of their masters on them, for example, something we’d probably associate more with slavery.[22] Indentured servants from Britain, who made up two thirds of the immigrants to British North America before 1776, could be sold, worked to exhaustion and beaten for misbehavior. They could not marry and, in Virginia at least, could be mutilated if they tried to escape. In Maryland the punishment was death.[23]<br />
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Slavery in colonial America was worse, but only in that it was permanent. On the other hand, as early as the 1400s in the Ottoman Empire people captured in war were sometimes settled to work lands owned by the sultan. Although technically slaves, their condition was closer to serfdom. These slaves formed families that lasted generations and passed down the land they worked to their children. Only if a head of household died without any children would his estate revert back to the imperial treasury. Later on, as Ottoman cities industrialized, factory owners preferred using slave labor because slaves would not leave for seasonal work elsewhere. By agreeing to mukātaba contracts with these slaves – in which the slaves bought their own freedom by installments – these factory owners were able to maximize the slaves’ productivity.[24] They were, in effect, more like wage laborers working for a set term in a master/servant relationship than slaves.<br />
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In Rome's &amp; Constantinople's streets, the status of a slave depended on the status of their…<br />
We might think of slavery as distinguished from other types of coerced labor by the question of choice. Indentured servants chose to enter into those contracts. Slaves would never choose to become slaves, right? But realities are much more complicated. Outside of slavery in the Americas, ‘voluntary slavery’ was not uncommon at all.[25] In Ming China many impoverished tenants sold themselves into slavery when they could not pay rent.[26] In 1724, the Russian czar abolished slavery and converted all of Russia’s slaves into serfs because serfs were offering themselves as slaves to avoid paying taxes; serfs paid taxes, slaves did not.[27] Earlier, in the fifteenth-century duchy of Muscovy, what scholars term the ‘limited service contract slavery’ became common. In such a contract, a person asks someone wealthy for a loan for a year, at which point the person will pay them back and will also work for them in the meantime instead of paying interest. If the borrower cannot pay the creditor back in a year, they become their slave. Most often, they became a lifetime slave. This type of slavery replaced all other forms of slavery in Russia. And yet there was also indentured servitude at the same time, differing from slavery only in that an indentured servant could not be physically harmed by their master.[28]<br />
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Unlike bonded laborers or serfs, we might think of slaves as people with little or no legal right to protection. This has often been true. In Ming China, slaves were often referred to as “not human.” Not only could they not own property, marry or have legitimate children, but killing one of them also posed no legal problem.[29] Among the Toraja people of Sulewesi (today in Indonesia), someone who had been convicted of a capital crime could have one of his slaves executed instead of himself.[30] A judge in South Carolina in 1847 declared that a slave “can invoke neither magna carta nor common law”; for the slave the law was whatever the master said.[31]<br />
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In Rome's &amp; Constantinople's streets, the status of a slave depended on the status of their…<br />
Yet not only were legal realities often quite complicated, so were the social realities behind the laws. In Roman law, slaves were conceptualized as people with no rights. Since they were, in theory, prisoners of war who had been spared execution, they were legally dead anyway.[32] And during the period of the Roman Republic (6th-1st centuries BCE), there was no legal restriction on a master’s treatment of his slaves. But such laws are not very helpful in distinguishing free from slave, however, since Roman heads of household at that time also enjoyed the theoretical ‘power of life and death’ over every man, woman and child in the family.[33] As the number of slaves in the expanding Roman Empire increased, however, laws were put in place to protect them. Under the emperor Hadrian (d. 138 CE) excessive punishment was forbidden, as was killing a slave without a legal ruling. The emperors Antoninus Pius (d. 161 CE) and later Constantine (d. 337 CE) made it clear that if a master killed his slave in cold blood or by excessive punishment he was guilty of homicide. And in the legal code of emperor Justinian (d. 565 CE) it was clear that the master’s rights to do violence to his slave were limited to reasonable discipline.[34]<br />
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In early America, all thirteen colonies had laws regulating race and slavery, which were occasionally updated. Although ten states in the South had slave codes making it a crime to mistreat slaves, mistreatment was understood in relation to the severity of the disobedience or infringement that the master was punishing. Amputating limbs, castration and execution were all allowed as punishments when the alleged crime was severe. And it was almost impossible for slaves to challenge any treatment in court, since they could not even testify. Nonetheless in North Carolina and Virginia a handful of white slave-owners were executed or imprisoned for murdering or cruelly treating their slaves.[35]<br />
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Definitions that Never Seem to Work<br />
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As a leading scholar of slavery, David Davis, observed, “The more we learn about slavery, the more difficulty we have defining it.”[36] A trans-historical definition of slavery has indeed proven very hard to find. As a leading scholar on Ottoman slavery has remarked, it is difficult to treat slavery as one definable phenomenon just in the Ottoman Empire, let alone globally (though he stresses that the varieties of slavery in the Ottoman realm were different in degrees not different in kind).[37] Nur Sobers-Khan has observed about slavery in Ottoman Istanbul, that it was so diverse that it doesn’t make sense to talk about slavery as a unified phenomenon even in one city let alone in the whole Mediterranean region.[38] Scholars don’t even agree on where to start. Many historians, proceeding from a Marxist paradigm, have sought to explain slavery as a purely economic phenomenon. Others, especially scholars of slavery in the Islamic world, have stressed that slavery is often much more of a social phenomenon. <br />
David Davis, observed, “The more we learn about slavery, the more difficulty we have defining…<br />
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Definitions of slavery have tended to revolve around three notions: the slave as a family-less outsider, the slave as property, and the slave as the object of violence.[39] But for a definition to fit all the things that people today commonly associate with slavery, that definition has to be so vague that it’s almost useless. So slavery is “the forced labor of one group by another,” according to some social scientists.[40] Others have suggested that the slave is always an outcast.[41] According to Davis, to apply across human history, slavery can only be defined as extreme social “debasement;” whatever the hierarchy, slaves are always at the bottom.[42]<br />
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Some scholars have proposed more specific definitions for slavery as an economic, legal and social condition. One argues that slavery is a mode of exploitation that is uniquely characterized by its means of reproducing itself, namely through political violence or captivity in war.[43]<br />
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The most influential, specific definition comes from Orlando Patterson, who defines slavery as always exhibiting three features. First, slavery involves perpetual domination ultimately enforced by violence. Second, slavery involves a state of natal alienation, “the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations” that preclude making claims of birth or passing them on to one’s children and that cuts the slave off from family and community except as allowed by the masters. They inherit no protection or privilege and can pass none on to their children. Finally, slaves are denied any honor. Slavery is thus defined as the “permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”[44]<br />
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But Patterson’s definition fails to apply to many instances of what we would otherwise think of as slavery. Sometimes it was the slaves who dominated free people, as in the case of the Turkish slave soldiers of the Abbasid caliphs in the ninth and early tenth centuries. Even before the Ottomans began their system of imperial slaves, Egypt and Syria were ruled by the Mamluk (literally, ‘slave’) state (c. 1260-1517). Although they were freed after they finished their military training, the Mamluk dynasty of Turkic or Caucasian warlords reproduced itself generation after generation by importing new slave soldiers into a ruling military elite that defined itself by its military slave experience.[45] Far from being dominated by anyone, they were their own masters and dominated the whole of the state and society. Patterson argues that slave elites in Islamic civilization were still effectively powerless because their fate still hung on the whim of their masters. But the frequency with which Abbasid Turkic slaves, Egyptian Mamluks, and Ottoman Janissaries summarily executed their masters when it suited them strongly suggests otherwise.<br />
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Nor have those who identify as slaves always been natally alienated. Byzantine imperial slaves could own property and bequeath it to their children.[46] The Ottoman agricultural slaves settled on imperial lands passed their estates on to their children for generations. Unlike Roman slavery, where the status of a child’s mother determined its status, the main position in the Shariah was that a slave woman who gave birth to her master’s child became free when her master died, as did her child. Until then he could not sell her. Far from being natally alienated from her child, its status as the child of a freeman ensured the mother’s own freedom. Elite imperial slaves like Sokollu Mehmet Pasha were technically natally alienated in the sense that, according to the letter of the Shariah in Ottoman lands, their wealth reverted back to the treasury (bayt al-mal) upon death. But in reality, when an elite imperial slave like Sokollu died, what transpired was a form of negotiation between state officials and the heirs. Since many of these slaves had amassed – and stashed – immense wealth, it was more efficient for the state to negotiate for a portion of it in return for allowing the heirs to receive the remainder without legal problems.[47] Here the slave’s natal alienation functioned more as an irregular estate tax than a total deprivation of their right to pass on their property to their heirs. There were also other easy means for circumventing the natal alienation of wealth. Like many wealthy citizens of the Ottoman Empire, imperial slaves could place their wealth in endowments (Ar. waqf, pl. awqaaf) and make their descendants the beneficiaries. [48]<br />
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Furthermore, the children of Ottoman imperial slaves could not pass their wealth on to their children (it reverted back to the imperial treasury upon their death), but their children retained the privileges of their fathers’ proximity to power as well as the status of their mothers. Sokollu Mehmet’s wife was the daughter of the sultan, so his sons attained high office. What is more striking is that, in many cases, Ottoman imperial slaves maintained their relationships to their original families in the Christian areas of the Balkans, using their newfound power to elevate their relatives.[49] Sokollu Mehmet appointed his brother as Orthodox Patriarch in the Balkans, and his cousin later followed him to the office of grand vizier.[50] Later, in the late eighteenth century, the Georgian slave elite in charge of administering the Ottoman province of Egypt maintained close relations to their families back in the Caucasus and even received visits from them.[51]<br />
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Sometimes exploiting family connections was one of the major purposes of enslavement. Though technically slaves, Christian Europeans captured by the Ottoman naval forces of Algiers in the eighteenth century were often more like hostages. They could send and receive mail from their families and, if their masters were lucky, their families paid ransoms to free them. In the meantime, they could own property, make money (those assigned to elite jobs like ‘cofeegi’, coffee pourer, might live better than in their home country) and mix freely.[52]<br />
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Slavery in Islam – A Political Question<br />
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Before delving into how slavery existed in Islam (see next essay), we should note that this is not a question asked in a vacuum. It hasn’t been for well over two centuries. In conversations and debates the response, ‘Well, does that mean slavery would be ok?’ is the ultimate trump card against someone arguing for indulging different values. Slavery is the ideal example to invoke because its evil is so morally clear and so widely acknowledged. Who would defend slavery? It is the Hitler of human practices. Yet despite all its power, the word slavery is rarely defined. In that sense, it is much like the word terrorism – its power lies in the assumptions behind its meaning and the moral condemnation it carries. But it is very poorly defined.<br />
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Like the word terrorism, slavery is also a deeply, deeply political issue, not in the sense of politics as what we see on the nightly news, but rather in the sense that it is inherently tied to questions of power. Just as the practice of slavery is an extreme exercise of power by some human beings over others, wielding the language of slavery is a claim to moral authority over others. It is no surprise that advocates of ending brutal or unacceptably exploitative labor practices such as sweatshops, child sex trafficking, forced marriage and organ trading refer to such phenomena as ‘modern day slavery.’ The reason for invoking the word ‘slavery’ instead of other definitions such as bonded labor or child labor is clear: slavery provokes an emotional reaction that spurs people into action and support for a cause. From students to rock stars, who wouldn’t support ending slavery?<br />
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Though such practices are indeed reprehensible, with ‘modern day’ slavery we run across some familiar problems. If we took the definitions of slavery used by activists fighting ‘modern slavery’ (the main one is it’s slavery ‘if you can’t walk away’) and applied them to just Western history we’d find that almost no one was free by their standards.[53] As some scholars have observed, the most prominent advocates for ending modern day slavery have not applied the label to the forced labor of criminals in the American penal system.[54] This is no doubt a very political choice, since fewer rockstars and students would be as willing to accuse the US government of engaging in ongoing slavery. So even when invoked for noble causes today, ‘slavery’ is still a deeply political word, both in the emotional reaction it triggers and in the self-censorship that people use in when and where they apply it.<br />
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The political nature of slavery is particularly pronounced in the history of Islam and the West. During the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries the fear of being captured by Muslim pirates in the Atlantic and western Mediterranean loomed large in the Western European (particularly British) imagination. And indeed thousands of British and Americans were taken as slaves in such a way. We still see the cultural imprint of this fear in movies like Never Say Never Again (1983), where James Bond rescues Kim Basinger from a remarkably out of place Arab slave auction, and Taken (2008), where Liam Neeson finally rescues his daughter from first (Muslim) Albanian traffickers and finally from a lascivious Arab sheik. But, like the selective use of the term ‘modern day slavery,’ this conversation is selective in its claim to Western moral authority. During the same era that Europeans and Americans were decrying capture and enslavement by Muslim pirates, the enslavement by Europeans of Muslims from the Ottoman Empire was booming.[55] And our Western cultural memories are even more selective. Western theatregoers likely felt no outrage in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) when Bond visits the harem of his Arab sheik friend and is offered one of the women (when in the Orient, says the sheik, “one should delve deeply into its treasures”). From the British tabloids to then private citizen Donald Trump, in 2015 many parroted the claim that Muslims in northern England were luring young white girls in as sex slaves. Some Muslims were doing this, but few media reports stated that the majority of offenders were actually white men.[56]<br />
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The political nature of slavery is particularly pronounced in the history of Islam and the…<br />
Conclusion: Focus on the Conditions, not the Word<br />
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The word slavery has been political even when it has been invoked for the best of causes. And the political forces that have shaped how slavery is understood have often hobbled the best efforts of those fighting against the extreme exploitation of fellow human beings. Abolitionists in the nineteenth century chose to define slavery as treating human beings as property in part because, if they defined slavery as harsh deprivation or exploitation, their pro-slavery opponents would just point to the factory of conditions of industrial England and American and note that ‘free’ workers were being treated just as badly.[57]<br />
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Having emphasized that slavery consisted of humans being treated as property, abolitionists were left with no objection to continued exploitation of the same people they had just freed once it became technically illegal to own people. British abolitionists succeeded in ending slavery in the Indian Ocean in the 1830s. But then they found that laborers were still being transported to East Africa from India in the same horrid conditions as slaves and with the same high mortality rate. They were just called ‘coolies’ rather than slaves.[58] Today, decades after the legal right to own other human beings was abolished globally, activists referred to as new abolitionists, seeking to mobilize public concern over exploitative labor, have redefined slavery as ‘not being able to walk away.’[59]<br />
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Ultimately, the word ‘slavery’ can mean so many things that it’s not very useful for accurate communication. It often ends up referring to things we don’t mean when we think of slavery, or it fails to match things we do associate with slavery. As such, the word slavery has limited use as a category or conceptual tool. It’s much more useful to talk about the extreme exploitation of human beings’ labor and the extreme deprivation of their rights. In any society, whether it has ‘slavery’ or not, we are likely to find such conditions. Instead of fixating on a word or ill-defined category, it is much more useful to focus on regulating conditions and protecting people’s rights in order to prevent such extreme debasement. And, as our next essay will show, this is precisely what the Shariah aimed to do.<br />
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As such, the word slavery has limited use as a category or conceptual tool.…<br />
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[1] The Ottoman tradition of elite slavery may have been inherited from the late Roman and Byzantine Empires, where imperial slaves (often eunuchs) could rise to high positions in the military and the administration; Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 104; Cam Grey, “Slavery in the Late Roman World,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume I The Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 499.<br />
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[2] Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 3 AD 1420-1804, ed. David Eltis and Stanley Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 200.<br />
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[3] Christoph K. Neumann, “Whom did Ahmet Cevdet represent?,” in Late Ottoman Society, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga, 117-134. London: Routledge, 2005), 117.<br />
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[4] David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 17-18.<br />
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[5] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22.<br />
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[6] Grey, “Slavery in the Late Roman World,” 496; Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 174-76.<br />
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[7] Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 22.<br />
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[8] Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” 191.<br />
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[9] Julia O’Connell Davidson, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 162.<br />
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[10] Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” 187.<br />
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[11] Vaughan Lowe, International Law: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.<br />
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[12] Here quoting Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 19.<br />
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[13] Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 17-18.<br />
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[14] Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 97-98.<br />
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[15] Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 12.<br />
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[16] David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, “Dependence, Servility, and Coerced Labor in Time and Space,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume 3, 3.<br />
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[17] Richard Hellie, “Russian Slavery and Serfdom, 1450-1804,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery Vol. 3, 276-77.<br />
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[18] Cam Grey, “Slavery in the Late Roman World,” 484-6.<br />
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[19] Hellie, “Russian Slavery,” 284, 292-93.<br />
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[20] Eltis and Engerman, “Dependence, Servility, and Coerced Labor,” 7; Davidson, Modern Slavery, 68. In England this issue was governed by the Statute of Artificers, which the American colonies only adopted in a limited way.<br />
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[21] Kerry Ward, “Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420-1804,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume 3, 165-66.<br />
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[22] Eltis and Engerman, “Dependence, Servility, and Coerced Labor,” 6.<br />
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[23] Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 8-9, 20; David Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 4.<br />
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[24] It was in the Ottoman state’s interest to keep this agricultural system stable; Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800-1909 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 12-13, 15.<br />
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[25] Stanley Engerman, “Slavery at Different Times and Places,” American Historical Review 105, n. 2 (2000): 481.<br />
<br />
[26] Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” 189.<br />
<br />
[27] Hellie, “Russian Slavery,” 284, 293.<br />
<br />
[28] Hellie, “Russian Slavery,” 279-80. The author notes the similarity between this Russian contract and the ancient Persian custom of antichrisis (as named by Greek authors).<br />
<br />
[29] Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” 191.<br />
<br />
[30] Ward, “Slavery in Southeast Asia,” 171.<br />
<br />
[31] Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon &amp; Shuster, 1985), 225.<br />
<br />
[32] W.W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (New York: AMS, 1969, reprint of 1908 Cambridge U. Press edition), 2-3.<br />
<br />
[33] Yan Thomas, “Vitae Necisque Potestas: Le Père, La Cité, La Mort,” Publications de l’École Française de Rome (1984): 499–548.<br />
<br />
[34] Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 36-8.<br />
<br />
[35] Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America, 35, 77; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 116; Paul Finkelman, “Slavery: United States Law,” in Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, 5:258-262; Friedman, A History of American Law, 225-6.<br />
<br />
[36] David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 8.<br />
<br />
[37] Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 164-65; Toledano, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 21.<br />
<br />
[38] See also Nur Sobers-Khan, Slaves without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers, 1560-1572 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014).<br />
<br />
[39] Martin Klein, “Introduction,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia, ed. Martin Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 4-5.<br />
<br />
[40] Rodney Coates, “Slavery” in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).<br />
<br />
[41] A. Testart, “The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery,” Revue Française de Sociologie 43 (2002): 176.<br />
<br />
[42] Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 17-19; Brenda Stevenson, What is Slavery? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015), 8.<br />
<br />
[43] Claudu Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery (London: Athlone, 1991).<br />
<br />
[44] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7-8, 13.<br />
<br />
[45] Nasser Rabbat, “The Changing Concept of the Mamlūk in the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria,” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa, ed. Miura Toru and John Edward Philips (London: Kegal Paul, 2000), 89, 97.<br />
<br />
[46] Rotman, Byzantine Slavery, 104.<br />
<br />
[47] See Ali Yaycıoğlu, “Wealth, Power and Death: Capital Accumulation and Imperial Seizures in the Ottoman Empire (1453-1839)” available at http://www.econ.yale.edu/~egcenter/Yaycioglu%20-%20Wealth%20Death%20and%20Power%20-%20November%202012.pdf.<br />
<br />
[48] Leslie Pierce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 315; Toledano, As if Silent and Absent, 25; Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147-48.<br />
<br />
[49] Dror Ze’evi, “My Slave, My Son, My Lord: Slavery, Family and the Sate in the Islamic Middle East,” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa, 75. See also Metin Kunt’s short article, “Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 3 (1974): 233-39.<br />
<br />
[50] Veinstein, G., “Soḳollu Meḥmed Pas̲h̲a”, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 21 November 2016 <http: dx.doi.org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu="" islam_sim_7090=""> First published online: 2012<br />
<br />
[51] Daniel Crecelius and Gotcha Djaparidze, “Relations of the Georgian Mamluks of Egypt with Their Homeland in the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 45, no. 3 (2002): 326.<br />
<br />
[52] Christine E. Sears, “‘In Algiers, the City of Bondage’: Urban Slavery in Comparative Context,” in New Directions in Slavery Studies, ed. Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 203, 207, 211.<br />
<br />
[53] Julia O’Connell Davidson, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3, 6, 22-23, 37-39, 69, 169.<br />
<br />
[54] Davidson, Modern Slavery, 100.<br />
<br />
[55] William Clarence-Smith and David Eltis, “White Servitude,” 139, 144.<br />
<br />
[56] See also www.thestar.co.uk/news/majority-of-rotherham-child-exploitation-suspects-are-white-claims-new-report-1-7392637.<br />
<br />
[57] Davidson, Modern Slavery, 31.<br />
<br />
[58] Davidson, Modern Slavery, 33.<br />
<br />
[59] Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 52-54.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these papers and articles are strictly those of the authors. Furthermore, Yaqeen does not endorse any of the personal views of the authors on any platform. Our team is diverse on all fronts allowing for constant enriching dialogue that helps us produce only the finest research.</http:></blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-46381031701397810652017-05-29T21:59:00.001-07:002017-11-11T10:37:47.999-08:00Don’t Blame Hillary - WSJ<div class="tr_bq">
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-blame-hillary-1496096042?mod=itp&amp;mod=djemITP_h">Don’t Blame Hillary - WSJ</a></div>
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<blockquote>
Friday’s commencement address at Wellesley—an attack on the man who defeated her—is only the latest outburst from a failed candidate, who has now vowed to take a leading position in the anti-Trump “resistance.” On the right these things provoke new headlines about sore loserhood. Far more interesting is the irritation Mrs. Clinton’s refusal to fade away is causing among fellow Democrats who blame her for the loss against what should have been an easily defeatable Republican nominee.<br />
<br />
This is supremely unfair to Mrs. Clinton. As flawed a candidate as she might have been, the truth is almost certainly the reverse. It is today’s Democratic Party that gave us Mrs. Clinton, as well as the thumping in November.<br />
<br />
Yes, the Clintons have always been flexible about principles, a big reason for the appeal of the more purist Bernie Sanders. Back when her husband was running for president as a “New Democrat” in 1992, the idea was that the party had shed its McGovernite past and moved to the center, so that it could now be trusted on values, the economy and national security. At the time Mr. Clinton advertised his wife as “two for the price of one.”<br />
<br />
Once they got in, Mrs. Clinton reverted to type by pushing, unsuccessfully, for universal health care. But after that belly-flop and the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress, they dialed it back, and by 1996 her husband was telling the American people “the era of big government is over.”<br />
<br />
As New York’s junior senator, Mrs. Clinton was firmly ensconced within her party. “On the 1,390 votes she cast in which most senators from one party voted differently from most senators across the aisle,” notes an April 2016 piece from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rollcall.com/news/hawkings/8-years-senate-votes-reveal-clinton">Roll Call</a>, “Clinton went against the Democratic grain only 49 times.”<br />
<br />
Even on the single issue that came to be used against her in last year’s Democratic presidential primary—her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq—Mrs. Clinton was squarely with her party. We’ve forgotten it today, but more Democrats voted with Mrs. Clinton on that one than against, including Harry Reid, John Edwards, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and John Kerry. Only a few years later she, again like them, opposed the surge.<br />
<br />
So which is she, hawk or dove? The truth is that she is both—and neither. In a notable section in the memoirs of fellow Obama cabinet member Bob Gates, he relates a conversation in which she admits her opposition to the surge in Iraq “had been political because she was facing [Barack Obama] in the Iowa primary.” Again this only puts her within the mainstream of her party: Most of the other Democrats who had voted for the war in 2002 would also oppose the surge in 2007.<br />
<br />
It has been a consistent pattern for Mrs. Clinton. On almost any issue that energizes her party—from same-sex marriage to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal—Mrs. Clinton has gone where the party has pulled her even if it meant going against where she had been. This is what Hollywood actress Rosario Dawson meant last summer when she asked a group of Sanders delegates at the convention to understand that Mrs. Clinton “is not a leader, she’s a follower.”<br />
<br />
But on what became the single overriding theme of her campaign, Mrs. Clinton was truly in sync with her party. This is the idea that she should be elected because she’s a woman, and that a coalition of millennials, minorities and women would come together to make it happen. So where Donald Trump had “Make America Great Again,” Mrs. Clinton had the identity project par excellence: “I’m with her.”<br />
After all, who could be more deserving to succeed the first African-American president than the first woman president?<br />
<br />
It didn’t turn out that way. And if you take the Trump blinders off for some perspective, there’s another dynamic that had little to do with Mrs. Clinton: the hemorrhaging of Democratic seats over the Obama years—from the governorships to state legislatures to Capitol Hill—to the point where the Democratic Party is now at its lowest levels in a century.<br />
<br />
By the time Mrs. Clinton had secured the nomination for president, she had embraced everything a far more progressive party wanted her to embrace. But she also inherited a party that was losing elections all across the country.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
So maybe it wasn’t only a flawed messenger that led Democrats to defeat in 2016. Maybe there’s a problem with the message, too.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-1445608541933744632017-03-11T08:15:00.001-08:002017-03-11T08:28:35.682-08:00Presidential Payback For Media Hubris | Hoover Institution<a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/presidential-payback-media-hubris">Presidential Payback For Media Hubris | Hoover Institution</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Sadly, the contemporary mainstream media—the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN), the traditional blue-chip newspapers (Washington Post, New York Times), and the public affiliates (NPR, PBS)—have lost credibility. They are no more reliable critics of President Trump’s excesses than they were believable cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s policies.<br />
<br />
Trump may have a habit of exaggeration and gratuitous feuding that could cause problems with his presidency. But we would never quite know that from the media. In just his first month in office, reporters have already peddled dozens of fake news stories designed to discredit the President—to such a degree that little they now write or say can be taken at face value.<br />
<br />
No, Trump did not have any plans to invade Mexico, as Buzzfeed and the Associated Press alleged.<br />
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No, Trump’s father did not run for Mayor of New York by peddling racist television ads, as reported by Sidney Blumenthal.<br />
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No, there were not mass resignations at the State Department in protest of its new leaders, as was reported by the Washington Post.<br />
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No, Trump’s attorney did not cut a deal with the Russians in Prague. Nor did Trump indulge in sexual escapades in Moscow. Buzzfeed again peddled those fake news stories.<br />
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No, a supposedly racist Trump did not remove the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the White House, as a Time Magazine reporter claimed.<br />
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No, election results in three states were not altered by hackers or computer criminals to give Trump the election, as implied by New York Magazine.<br />
<br />
No, Michael Flynn did not tweet that he was a scapegoat. That was a media fantasy endorsed by Nancy Pelosi.<br />
<br />
In fact, Daniel Payne of the Federalist has compiled a lengthy list of sensational stories about Trump’s supposed buffooneries, mistakes, and crudities that all proved either outright lies or were gross exaggerations and distortions.<br />
<br />
We would like to believe writers for the New York Times or Washington Post when they warn us about the new president’s overreach. But how can we do so when they have lost all credibility—either by colluding with the Obama presidency and the Hillary Clinton campaign, or by creating false narratives to ensure that Trump fails?<br />
<br />
Ezra Klein at Vox just wrote a warning about the autocratic tendencies of Donald Trump. Should we believe him? Perhaps not. Klein was the originator of Journolist, a “left-leaning” private online chat room of journalists that was designed to coordinate media narratives that would enhance Democratic politicians and in particular Barack Obama. Such past collusion begs the question of whether Klein is really disinterested now in the fashion that he certainly was not during the Obama administration.<br />
<br />
Recently, New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush coauthored a report<br />
<br />
about initial chaos among the Trump White House staff, replete with unidentified sources. Should we believe Thrush’s largely negative story?<br />
<br />
Perhaps. But then again, Thrush not so long ago turned up in the Wikileaks troves as sending a story to Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta for prepublication audit. Thrush was his own honest critic, admitting to Podesta: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.”<br />
<br />
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has become a fierce critic of President Trump. Are his writs accurate? Milbank also appeared in Wikileaks, asking the Democratic National Committee to provide him with free opposition research for a negative column he was writing about candidate Trump. Are Milbank’s latest attacks his own—or once again coordinated with Democratic researchers?<br />
<br />
The Washington Post censor Glenn Kessler posted the yarn about Trump’s father’s racist campaign for New York mayor—until he finally fact-checked his own fake news and deleted his tweet.<br />
<br />
Sometimes the line between journalism and politicians is no line at all. Recently, former Obama deputy National Security advisor Ben Rhodes (brother of CBS news president David Rhodes) took to Twitter to blast the Trump administration’s opposition to the Iran Deal, brokered in large part by Rhodes himself. “Everything Trump says here,” Rhodes stormed, “is false.”<br />
<br />
Should we believe Rhodes’s charges that Trump is now lying about the details of the Iran Deal?<br />
<br />
Who knows, given that Rhodes himself not long ago bragged to the New York Times of his role in massaging reporters to reverberate an administration narrative: “We created an echo chamber They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” Rhodes also had no respect for the very journalists that he had manipulated: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”<br />
<br />
Is Rhodes now being disinterested or once again creating an “echo chamber”?<br />
<br />
His boss, former UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, Susan Rice (married to Ian Cameron, a former producer at ABC news), likewise went on Twitter to blast the Trump administration’s decision to include presidential advisor Steven Bannon in meetings of the National Security Council: “This is stone cold crazy,” Rice asserted, “After a week of crazy.”<br />
<br />
Is Rice (who has no military experience) correct that the former naval officer Bannon has no business participating in such high strategy meetings?<br />
<br />
In September 2012, Rice went on television on five separate occasions to insist falsely to the nation that the attacks on the Benghazi consulate were the work of spontaneous rioters and not a preplanned hit by an al Qaeda franchise. Her own quite crazy stories proved a convenient administration reelection narrative of Al Qaeda on the run, but there were already sufficient sources available to Rice to contradict her false news talking points.<br />
<br />
There are various explanations for the loss of media credibility.<br />
<br />
First, the world of New York and Washington DC journalism is incestuous. Reporters share a number of social connections, marriages, and kin relationships with liberal politicians, making independence nearly culturally impossible.<br />
<br />
More importantly, the election in 2008 of Barack Obama marked a watershed, when a traditionally liberal media abandoned prior pretenses of objectivity and actively promoted the candidacy and presidency of their preferred candidate. The media practically pronounced him god, the smartest man ever to enter the presidency, and capable of creating electric sensations down the legs of reporters. The supposedly hard-hitting press corps asked Obama questions such as, “During these first 100 days, what has …enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most…?”<br />
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Obama, as the first African-American president—along with his progressive politics that were to the left of traditional Democratic policies—enraptured reporters who felt disinterested coverage might endanger what otherwise was a rare and perhaps not-to-be-repeated moment.<br />
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We are now in a media arena where there are no rules. The New York Times is no longer any more credible than talk radio; CNN—whose reporters have compared Trump to Hitler and gleefully joked about his plane crashing—should be no more believed than a blogger’s website. Buzzfeed has become like the National Inquirer.<br />
<br />
Trump now communicates, often raucously and unfiltered, directly with the American people, to ensure his message is not distorted and massaged by reporters who have a history of doing just that. Unfortunately, it is up to the American people now to audit their own president’s assertions. The problem is not just that the media is often not reliable, but that it is predictably unreliable. It has ceased to exist as an auditor of government. Ironically the media that sacrificed its reputation to glorify Obama and demonize Trump has empowered the new President in a way never quite seen before. At least for now, Trump can say or do almost anything he wishes without media scrutiny—given that reporters have far less credibility than does Trump.<br />
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Trump is the media’s Nemesis—payback for its own hubris.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<h3>
<a href="https://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/">16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won</a></h3>
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Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.<br />
By Daniel Payne<br />
FEBRUARY 6, 2017<br />
Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.<br />
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We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than “epidemic,” insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when “an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.”<br />
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The “agent” in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the “susceptible hosts” are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.<br />
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It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.<br />
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Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.<br />
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How we will get out of this is anyone’s guess. We might not get out of it, not so long as Trump is president of these United States. We may be up for four—maybe eight!—long years of authentic fake news media hysteria. It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media’s collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.<br />
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Since Trump’s election, here’s just a small sampling of fake news that our media and our journalist class have propagated.<br />
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Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates<br />
After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.<br />
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At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.<br />
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At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”<br />
<br />
She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.<br />
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November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory<br />
On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”<br />
<br />
The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.<br />
<br />
It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.<br />
<br />
At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.<br />
<br />
December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure<br />
At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Woellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Woellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”<br />
<br />
The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.<br />
<br />
The problem? The central scandalous claims of Woellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”<br />
<br />
Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.<br />
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January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball<br />
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.<br />
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January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’<br />
Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.<br />
<br />
To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.<br />
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January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy<br />
On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”<br />
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January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter<br />
During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”<br />
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This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.<br />
<br />
How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).<br />
<br />
The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.<br />
<br />
Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.<br />
<br />
January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department<br />
On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.<br />
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The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.<br />
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There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).<br />
<br />
More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.<br />
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As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.<br />
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January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair<br />
On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.<br />
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The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.<br />
<br />
January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax<br />
Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.<br />
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January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake<br />
Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.<br />
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Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.<br />
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January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie<br />
On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”<br />
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Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.<br />
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The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.<br />
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There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.<br />
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February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico<br />
On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”<br />
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Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.<br />
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Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.<br />
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February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions<br />
Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.<br />
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A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.<br />
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At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.<br />
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In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”<br />
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February 2: Renaming Black History Month<br />
At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.<br />
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The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.<br />
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February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures<br />
On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.<br />
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The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).<br />
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Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).<br />
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The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.<br />
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If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)<br />
<br />
As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.<br />
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The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.<br />
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As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”<br />
<br />
Maybe It’s Time to Stop Reading Fake News<br />
Surely more incidents have happened since Trump was elected; doubtlessly there are many more to come. To be sure, some of these incidents are larger and more shameful than others, and some are smaller and more mundane.<br />
<br />
But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question: why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?<br />
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Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.<br />
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That being said, there are two possible outcomes to this fake news crisis: our media can get better, or they can get worse. If they get better, we might actually see our press begin to hold the Trump administration (and government in general) genuinely accountable for its many admitted faults. If they refuse to fix these serial problems of gullibility, credulity, outrage, and outright lying, then we will be in for a rough four years, if not more.<br />
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No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.<br />
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Most of us are hoping devoutly for the former. But not even a month into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the outlook is dim.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-42762184440579346692017-03-08T21:32:00.001-08:002017-03-08T21:33:47.633-08:00Race And Racism | According To Hoyt<a href="https://accordingtohoyt.com/2017/03/07/race-and-racism/">Race And Racism | According To Hoyt</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>There is one thing in which liberal activists are right: everyone is racist. There is one thing in which they’re wrong: everyone is racist.<br />
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Racism is not confined to white people — and the idea that it equals prejudice plus power is an interesting (and stupid, as usual) Marxist distortion we’ll deal with later — it’s a characteristic of being human.<br />
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Why? Oh, like most other things because it was evolutionarily sound. I.e. those who had it survived and had more kids.<br />
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The thing is it’s not so much “racism” as in discriminating against another race. It’s “Fear of the stranger.”<br />
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And even if it involves just-so stories, it really doesn’t take much to figure out why people who have a fear of the stranger survive and have more children more than those who don’t. Even in modern society, the teen who will hitchhike and get in the car with just anyone has a higher chance of ending up dead. But long before that, the little kid who approaches panel vans driven by strangers, has a good chance of ending up dead. (NOT as high was our media makes it out to be, but high enough their scares are justified.)<br />
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In pre-human times, with many bands and tribelets living close enough for kids to stray, the name for a kid who thought that his family or strangers were equivalent was — at least if we go by how our closest relatives, the chimps, treat young from other bands — “dinner.”<br />
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Oh sure, in times of stress and famine, the chances that your own band would tuck in were fairly high, but still the chances that dear old mom would eat you were not nearly as high as that a stranger would eat you.<br />
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The thing is, this fear of the stranger activates more the more the stranger looks like you and your family. No, seriously. When is the last time anyone was accused of racism towards another species (Okay, fine, Harambe, but that’s an exception and also liberals be cray.) This makes perfect sense, because even toddlers (at least those not desensitized by stuffed animals and parents’ being idiots) understand that large animals are dangerous.<br />
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Okay, so being afraid of cows might be a new one, and I sort of invented it (I have no idea why as a child I thought cows and horses were both man-eaters. None. But then I thought there were sharks with chainsaws under my bed ready to lop off any limb that extended over the edge, so we might as well admit as a proto-writer I was already rather Odd) but most kids are afraid of anything large and furry that charges towards them. This is not racism, it’s survival.<br />
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The fear of the stranger that goes under “racism” in our society is the fear of people like us and yet not like us.<br />
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And it’s not racism in the sense that the media and liberals (who be cray) portray it. If you believe racism as they portray it, then you believe paler people are born with an instinctive fear of African features and dark skin. For the party that claims to be for “science” this is odder than believing in chainsaw sharks. What is their evolutionary reason for it, precisely? Is it the sort of fear as that of the Aliens in Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s end? Are people of African descent thought to bring about the apocalypse and does time run in a circular fashion?<br />
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Oh, I know, they say we all internalize racism and self-racism. Both those things are stupid. We absorb all sorts of prejudices from the society we live in, but for the last several decades we’ve been pounded with anti-racism. It works too. I was reading a mystery from the eighties where the teen wishes she were black, because you know, black people are so much cooler and don’t oppose other people. Yep, the book was written in the eighties. (And I thought “Rachel Dolezal, we hardly knew ya”) and the writer thought this was a perfectly sane character to sketch. And who knows, it might be, given the barrage of anti-racist propaganda. (More on that later, too.) But racism, true racism, is “fear of the stranger.” The myths and attacks come from THAT and it’s one of the basic instincts of humans. BTW it also makes “internalized racism” even dumber. You don’t fear yourself as a stranger, unless you’ve had one of those strokes that make it impossible to recognize yourself in the mirror.<br />
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So if the fear isn’t of dark skin or African features, what is it a fear of? “People who are not like my family/tribe/village to whom I’m accustomed” is a better way to describe it.<br />
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When I was a little girl, living in Portugal, I saw all kind of distinctions when I first entered elementary school. Some of my classmates were much darker than I, some were blond. Some were tall, some were short. Being sort of medium, I never had that trigger fear of the “stranger” or at least not towards appearance.<br />
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It took going back after 30 years here to realize as a child I’d seen differences that weren’t there. For one, Portuguese “blond” is a medium brown hair (unless enhanced with dye.) I myself was often called “ruiva” by guys calling from street corners, because my dark brown hair threw off red highlights in the full sun. Oh, sure there was a Viking in the wood pile there, and if I’d been in the sun a lot, my hair would look flame red when fully lit (acutally bozo-red. My kids make fun of those pictures.) BUT in the shade hair was dark brown (now it is whatever I feel like coloring it, being a rather ugly iron-grey since I was 28.)<br />
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It took my going back after 30 years here and getting stuck watching some sort of multi-school gymnastics competition to have the stunning realization of “Heavens, all these kids look like cousins.”<br />
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This is because the human brain in a highly homogeneous population will find the most minor differences to attach “stranger danger” to.<br />
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As for big differences… I was six the first time I saw a blond man. I mean REALLY blond. He must have been a tourist. In those days there weren’t many tourists in the north of Portugal, and at any rate, I was only taken to the city when I needed to buy shoes or something else my parents couldn’t find in the village.<br />
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So I’d never seen a blond. As I remember, I screamed, and tried to run. I also had nightmares for days. In my mind, I decided he was one of those molded plastic dolls, hair and skin the same color, that had come to life. But that came after for the nightmares. The first reaction was pure fear of the stranger.<br />
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The thing about that? Fear of the stranger — duh — goes away with familiarity. I had a blond friend in college (real blond, even if dark blond. Her parents were not from around there. At least her dad wasn’t.) My husband’s best friend for twenty years, whose kids were raised with ours as “cousins” was blond. His kids are blond. I don’t run screaming from them.<br />
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If kids are raised together in a great variety of skin colors and hair colors, they don’t even notice them. My kids who attended an urban school, rarely remembered to tell me the race of their friends. Which really wasn’t an issue, except when the friends did the same and their parents did have an issue with friendships between races.<br />
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Because again, it is fear of the stranger. Take an American kid who was raised with all skin colors, though, and introduce someone who dresses funny and the fear of the stranger activates. Which is why we’re now using (and fostering) “racism” for things that have bloody nothing to do with race.<br />
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I’ve become a different race before my very eyes, for instance. Worst, my family, abroad, has internalized/believes this. Oh, not a different race from them, but that we’re all a minority and despised.<br />
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Look, I grew up thinking of myself as “White.” This is a broad church in Portugal. I have a cousin who looks considerably more African than Obama’s Reverend Wright, but was also considered “White.” You’d really need to look pretty dark not to be considered “white.”<br />
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Yes, there were hints that some people already considered Portuguese “Latin” when I came here thirty years ago. Like, my first boss in the US thought Portugal was a city in Mexico (and he didn’t like Mexicans.) Someone (at a Mensa meeting for Bob’s sake,) was so sold on me as “Hispanic” that he heard my accent as that of Ricky Ricardo’s. Those of you who heard me (or search sings the blues in this blog, where there is a reading) should be jaw-dropped. Portuguese LOOKS like Spanish written, but sounds nothing like Spanish, so the accent is markedly different. Oh, and when I got my social security card they tried to put “Hispanic” in the field. I’d have taken Latin, but there was no such classification and Spanish I’m NOT.<br />
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The Hispanic/Latin classification in governmental things isn’t STRICTLY a race. There are Hispanic whites (one of our friends was an exchange student from argentina, whose family were first generation immigrants from Italy. If they’d immigrated here they’d be “white” but they hadn’t, so she was “Hispanic.”) and black Hispanics and everything in between.<br />
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At least that was the idea. BUT the problem when you paint a target and say “this is different” you’re going to activate the human instinct for “fear of the stranger.” And remember that this fear of the stranger can and does pick up minute differences.<br />
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So, over the last thirty years, I’ve watched Latin become a race. I’m still not 100 percent sure what people are picking up on, and sometimes what they do pick/don’t pick is bewildering. I’ve more than once been in a line/situation where my two kids are picked as “Latin” but I’m not. Given they’re a mix of me and their very white anglo-saxon looking father, this is somewhat bewildering. Though I’m happy — ???– to report as times go on, I too am picked out as Latin by strangers who don’t even ask before writing “Latin” in the form or saying “Hey, you’re Latin.” (To be fair, whatever the heck the marker is might have been there from the beginning, witness first boss, and social security lady.But it’s now more prevalent. People are more alert to the signs.)<br />
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It’s more prevalent now, though. People used to mistake me for Russian (this sometimes still happens, if they hear me before taking a good look at me), Greek, Italian, or Arab. But now, nine times out of ten it’s “Latin.”<br />
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Sure there are manners, there is a culture. I can laugh at “you’re so Cuban” jokes because they’re remarkably similar to what “you’re so Portuguese” jokes would be. And maybe what people are picking up on is gestures, a way of standing, but it’s all getting both highlighted by saying “look at this minority here” (seriously, guys, we could do this with redheads or people who have freckles by deciding they were an oppressed minority) and made “racial” instead of cultural. (Part of this is the liberal — liberals be cray — confusion between race and culture. They have come to think these are the same and culture can’t be changed, which is why making someone learn/speak English is racist. As someone who learned English at 14 I’m here to tell you calling Harambe’s death the result of racism is SANER.)<br />
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Because of that there is a tendency to consider “white” only blond and blue eyed, which frankly excludes even my husband.<br />
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The justification for this is the delightful Marxist illusion that racism= prejudice + power. Have I mentioned I thought Marx — who at any rate is not the originator of this illusion. That’s his followers trying to make his crazy cakes theory work — and his followers are all some form of Aspergers, and unable to see things outside what they’re classified as?<br />
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They seem to think — be honest, most sf writers do too — that power equals institutional/economic/government power.<br />
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Power in human societies is a matter of one on one interactions. Even if all black people in the US were held in menial positions, do you know how much power those can have? Yep, a cook can spit in your food. But more than that, a daycare worker can wreak havoc among her charges and mess with their self-image for years, even though she’s ultimately a low paid drone. But of course, because of various affirmatives, black people are disproportionately represented in the machinery of our government, both local and federal. And if you think that a DMV worker has no power over you, you don’t drive.<br />
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Even if racism REALLY were a thing of power and prejudice, it would apply to every “race” of human, ever. But it’s not. Racism is a fear of the stranger.<br />
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And our industrial-education-entertainment complex has the ability to cut out entire groups of people, point them out as different and thereby CREATE racism against them, which then requires intervention to make them “non discriminated against.”<br />
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It’s as old a game as any. “Divide and conquer.” If people are dependent on the government to keep them from each other’s throats, then they won’t notice the government is planting a foot more and more firmly on their necks. And if they do, they won’t unite to topple that government.<br />
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Sure, you’ll always experience “stranger danger” when you meet someone who is truly different. But stranger danger doesn’t shove people into groups and then train them to fear every other group. By rights, Reverend Wright should be part of the great indistinct majority of people who can be “Whatever” if everyone, himself included, hadn’t been trained to think of african features as meaning “different race.” (Older son gets considered black as often as Latin. It’s the features.)<br />
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Stranger danger is not racism as the ideologues proclaim it, but it’s the only form of non-government-induced racism, and the basis of what they use to try to claim that everyone is racist (like that heinous experiment with infants.) Stranger danger is a leftover instinct, not particularly useful in our society except to keep children from panel vans.<br />
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Fortunately it can be defeated by living in a varied society with people of all sizes and colors. After a while the alarm stops ringing.<br />
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Of course, you’ll still react to someone who ACTS weird comes to town. But seriously, would you want to stop that? Often it is a sign of danger, in fact, as often “acting weird” has to do with mental illness.<br />
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More importantly, when that leftist activist comes to town, do you want to think of her as just another human being, even as she lectures you on your “toxic whiteness”? Think of the lost opportunities to point and laugh.</blockquote>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-49833207444283536042017-03-08T19:08:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:14:56.963-08:00Snowflakes Melting: Huge Rise in Personality Disorders Among Millennials<a href="http://ace.mu.nu/archives/368753.php">Ace of Spades HQ</a>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-29500303074630703152017-03-06T18:16:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:14:56.939-08:00More Fake News from the Left | Power Line<a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/12/more-fake-news-from-the-left.php">More Fake News from the Left | Power Line</a>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-4866237590300152552017-03-06T17:57:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:14:56.957-08:00What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?<a href="https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/march/trump-clinton-debates-gender-reversal.html">What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders?</a>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-18345467162051092802017-03-04T21:51:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:14:56.926-08:00When Dogs Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Dogs - Watcher of Weasels<a href="http://www.watcherofweasels.org/when-dogs-are-outlawed-only-outlaws-will-have-dogs/">When Dogs Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Dogs - Watcher of Weasels</a>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-37456337168999733972017-03-04T21:47:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:14:56.945-08:00Presidential Payback For Media Hubris | Hoover Institution<a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/presidential-payback-media-hubris">Presidential Payback For Media Hubris | Hoover Institution</a>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-26793377738762013272017-03-04T21:46:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:14:00.633-08:00Kidnapping and Torture of White Male by 4 Black Gang Bangers is Savage and Racist (UPDATED) | PUMABydesign001's Blog<a href="https://pumabydesign001.com/2017/01/05/kidnapping-and-torture-of-white-male-by-4-black-gang-bangers-is-savage-and-racist-updated/">Kidnapping and Torture of White Male by 4 Black Gang Bangers is Savage and Racist (UPDATED) | PUMABydesign001's Blog</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Chicago PD has arrested the four gang bangers responsible for the two-day kidnapping and torture of a mentally disabled white male.<br />
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The gang of four who live streamed their acts of depravity which has left their victim traumatized have been charged with committing a hate crime among other charges.<br />
<br />
Brittany and Tanishia Covington, Jordan Hill and Tesfaye Cooper are all charged with kidnapping, aggravated battery and aggravated unlawful restraint. Three of the four thugs detained were also charged with burglary.<br />
<br />
Be sure to watch CPD press release below breaking down the string of events which lead to the arrest of these thugs. Talk about insanity.<br />
....<br />
What are the odds that the court will throw the book at these thugs? Don’t hold your breath. <br />
....<br />
With any luck, Jeff Sessions once confirmed, will not allow this case to be swept under the rug. Black on white violence must for once be reigned in.</blockquote><br />
-{....}-<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The Chicago Police Department, so politically correct, can’t find the words, are either afraid or just refuse t0 call this attack by its name. Instead, after decades of the inmates running the asylum, Chicago PD is attributing the kidnapping to boys being boys, correction, “kids will be kids.”</blockquote><br />
-{....}-<br />
<br />
<blockquote>There are those who refuse to call this racist attack by its name. Who are they? The same race baiters who by no fluke are profiteers of the grievance industry. You see, while there is money to be made in what is ordained “white on Black violence,” it has been officially declared that there is no money to be made or crime in “Black on white violence.”<br />
<br />
Those dismissing this attack by refusing to call it by its name have a vested interest in dismissing the act because it does not fit their narrative and they see no profit.<br />
<br />
Comments across social media and so-called new reports by government sanctioned propaganda machines continue to reflect as much.</blockquote>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-40398379269036852232017-03-04T20:30:00.001-08:002017-11-11T10:06:56.719-08:00Where Liberals Go Wrong on 'Discrimination'<a href="http://dailysignal.com/2017/03/01/just-because-liberals-call-something-discrimination-doesnt-mean-it-actually-is/">Where Liberals Go Wrong on 'Discrimination'</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<h2>
Just Because Liberals Call Something ‘Discrimination’ Doesn’t Mean It Actually Is</h2>
<br />
The biggest problem with current sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws—including “Fairness for All,” which proposes a grand-bargain compromise between SOGI laws and religious liberty—is that they do not appropriately define what counts as discriminatory.<br />
<br />
As I explain in a new report for The Heritage Foundation, “How to Think About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policies and Religious Freedom,” these are the laws that are being used to shutter Catholic adoption agencies, fine evangelical bakers, and force businesses and public facilities to allow men into women’s locker rooms.<br />
<br />
The problem is that liberals are calling anything they dislike “discrimination.” But liberals are getting it wrong. To illustrate this, consider several different cases of putative “discrimination.” The law must be nuanced enough to capture the important differences in these cases.<br />
<br />
<b>Invidious and Rightly Unlawful Discrimination</b><br />
<br />
Racially segregated water fountains were one form of discrimination that took race into consideration—in a context where it was completely irrelevant—and then treated blacks as second-class citizens precisely because they were black. The entire point was to classify on the basis of race in order to treat blacks as socially inferior.<br />
<br />
As a result, such actions were rightly described as invidious race-based discrimination, and—given the entrenched, widespread, state-facilitated nature of the problem—they were rightly made unlawful.<br />
<br />
Likewise, throughout much of American history, girls and women were not afforded educational opportunities equal to those available to boys and men. This form of discrimination took sex into consideration and then treated girls and women poorly precisely because of their sex, barring them from education in certain subjects or at certain levels despite being otherwise qualified.<br />
<br />
As with invidious racial discrimination, such treatment took a feature (in this case, sex) into consideration precisely to treat women as less than men. The law rightly deemed such actions invidious sex-based discrimination, and—again, given the entrenched, widespread, and state-facilitated nature of the problem—Title IX of the Education Amendments was enacted to ensure that girls and women received equal educational opportunities.<br />
<br />
<b>Appropriate and Rightly Lawful Distinctions That Are Not Classified as Discrimination</b><br />
<br />
When Title IX was enacted in 1972 and its implementing regulations were promulgated in 1975, the law made clear that sex-specific housing, bathrooms, and locker rooms were not unlawful discrimination. Such policies take sex into consideration, but they do not treat women as inferior to men or men as inferior to women. They treat both sexes equally because they take sex into consideration (they “discriminate”—in the nonpejorative sense of “distinguish”—on the basis of sex) precisely in a way that matters: by appreciating the bodily sexual difference of men and women in things such as housing, bathroom, and locker room policy.<br />
<br />
Would we really be treating men and women equally in anything but an artificial way if we forced men and women, boys and girls, to undress in front of each other?<br />
<br />
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her majority opinion for the Supreme Court forcing the Virginia Military Institute to become co-ed, wrote that it “would undoubtedly require alterations necessary to afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex in living arrangements.” Yet we certainly would be treating people unequally if access to intimate facilities were based on factors wholly unrelated to privacy, such as race.<br />
<br />
As a result, policymakers did not consider sex-specific intimate facilities as discriminatory in the first place, and laws explicitly reflected that commonsense understanding while rightly declaring racially segregated facilities to be unlawful.<br />
<br />
The lesson here is that not all distinctions in fact should be deemed unlawful discrimination.<br />
<br />
<b>Not Discriminatory at All</b><br />
<br />
If sex-specific intimate facilities are an example of lawful, legitimate policies that take sex into consideration, pro-life medical practices are examples of policies that are legitimate and lawful because they do not take sex into consideration at all.<br />
<br />
That only women can get pregnant has no bearing whatsoever on the judgment of the conscientious doctor or nurse who refuses to kill the unborn. The insistence of LGBT activists that men actually can become pregnant highlights the point: Pro-life medical personnel refuse to do abortions on pregnant women and “pregnant men” (i.e. women who identify as men).<br />
<br />
&gt;&gt;&gt;For more on this, see Ryan T. Anderson’s new book from Oxford University Press, “Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination”<br />
<br />
Thus, we can identify three different types of cases:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Cases of invidious discrimination, in which an irrelevant factor is taken into consideration in order to treat people poorly based on that factor, as with racially segregated water fountains;</li>
<li>Cases of distinctions without unlawful discrimination, in which a factor is taken into consideration precisely because it is relevant to the underlying policy and people are not treated poorly, as with sex-specific intimate facilities; and</li>
<li>Cases with neither distinctions nor discrimination, in which a particular factor simply does not enter into consideration, as with pro-life doctors.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Any proposed policy intended to address the documented needs of people who identify as LGBT must take these categories into account without conflation.<br />
<br />
<b>SOGI Discrimination: Real and Imagined</b><br />
<br />
Consider a florist who refused to serve all customers who identify as LGBT simply because they identified as LGBT. That would be a case of invidious discrimination because the mere knowledge that they identify as LGBT should have no impact whatsoever on the act of the florist selling flowers, because there is no rational connection between the two.<br />
<br />
Now consider Baronelle Stutzman, the 71-year-old grandmother who served one particular gay customer for nearly a decade but declined to do the wedding flowers for his same-sex wedding ceremony.<br />
<br />
Baronelle Stutzman lost her case and is appealing to the Supreme Court. (Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)<br />
Baronelle Stutzman lost her case and is appealing to the Supreme Court. (Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)<br />
The customer’s sexual orientation did not play any role in Stutzman’s decision. Her belief that marriage is a union of sexually complementary spouses does not spring from any convictions about people who identify as LGBT. When she says she can do wedding flowers only for true weddings, she makes no distinctions based on sexual orientation at all.<br />
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This is seen most clearly in the case of Catholic Charities adoption agencies. They decline to place the children entrusted to their care with same-sex couples not because of their sexual orientation, but because of the conviction that children deserve both a mother and a father.<br />
<br />
That belief—that men and women are not interchangeable, mothers and fathers are not replaceable, the two best dads in the world cannot make up for a missing mom, and the two best moms in the world cannot make up for a missing dad—has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation.<br />
<br />
Catholic Charities does not say that people who identify as LGBT cannot love or care for children; it does not take sexual orientation into consideration at all. Its preference for placing children with mothers and fathers is not an instance of discrimination based on sexual orientation—and the law should not say otherwise.<br />
<br />
Purported gender identity discrimination presents similar problems. The Washington Post recently reported on a woman who was suing a Catholic hospital for declining to perform a sex reassignment procedure on her that entailed removing her healthy uterus. In that report, the Post captures the conflation of real and imaginary discrimination.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“What the rule says is if you provide a particular service to anybody, you can’t refuse to provide it to anyone,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign. That means a transgender person who shows up at an emergency room with something as basic as a twisted ankle cannot be denied care, as sometimes happens, Warbelow said. That also means if a doctor provides breast reconstruction surgery or hormone therapy, those services cannot be denied to transgender patients seeking them for gender dysphoria, she said.</blockquote>
<br />
The two examples given, however, differ in significant ways. A hospital that refuses to treat the twisted ankles of people who identify as transgender simply because they identify as transgender would be engaging in invidious discrimination, but a hospital that declines to remove the perfectly healthy uterus of a woman who identifies as a man is not engaging in “gender identity” discrimination.<br />
<br />
The gender identity of the patient plays no role in the decision-making process: Just as pro-life physicians do not kill unborn babies, regardless of the sex or gender identity of the pregnant person, doctors do not remove healthy uteruses from any patients, regardless of how they identify themselves.<br />
<br />
As for the Human Rights Campaign spokesperson’s claim that emergency rooms “sometimes” refuse to treat the twisted ankles of transgender patients, there is no evidence—including on their own website—that it or anything similar in fact happens. Furthermore, insofar as this “sometimes happens,” it seems reasonable to think that the media would focus so much attention on it that the hospital would reverse course within hours. It therefore seems highly unlikely that this alleged problem merits a governmental response.<br />
<br />
<b>Need for Policy Shapes the Nature of Policy Response, Definitions, and Protections</b><br />
<br />
My new Heritage report argues that any justified government policy must not penalize valid forms of action and interaction or burden the rights of conscience, religion, and speech. We can see this principle in action.<br />
<br />
Because there was such widespread, entrenched systemic and institutional racism throughout American society in the 1960s, for example, and because social and market forces were not sufficient to remedy the problem, it was appropriate for government to respond. That response was properly tailored to meet this need. It defined discrimination to include racially segregated accommodations, places of employment, and housing providers while providing thin religious liberty protections.<br />
<br />
Because the justification for antidiscrimination laws based on race was so strong and the need was so great, the law was appropriately broad with limited exemptions.<br />
<br />
By contrast, consider laws that address discrimination based on sex. Because the nature of sex and the history of sexism did not represent an exact parallel to racism, the law did not treat them in entirely the same ways. Discrimination was legally defined so as not to include sex-specific intimate facilities, and much broader—and in some cases total—religious liberty exemptions were included. And to this day, sex is not a protected class for federal antidiscrimination law as applied to public accommodations.<br />
<br />
In sum, because the justification for laws against sex-based discrimination was weaker than the justification for laws against race-based discrimination, the legal response was more modest: It covered less terrain, defined discrimination more narrowly, and provided greater protection for religious liberty.<br />
<br />
Any proposed policies intended to meet the needs of people who identify as LGBT would need to be crafted in a similar manner. Without greater evidence of the justification for specific policy responses—greater documentation of what the needs truly are—it is hard to be specific. In general, however, the need clearly seems weaker than the need for policies designed to deal with discrimination on the basis of race and sex.<br />
<br />
A policy response would therefore need to cover less ground, target discrimination more narrowly, define discrimination accurately, and avoid undermining the rights of conscience, religion, and speech. Alas, laws proposed by liberals today do not do this.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-22546464262164878752017-03-04T20:28:00.001-08:002017-11-11T09:58:25.977-08:00"Privilege" again<a href="https://feedly.com/i/entry/JnE/JTYEJ/ZunRvplaKj2KbN35V324eEZ2TjwnE3Udw=_15a994d381c:e3c2a1:d3670bb0">JJR-PC Watch</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
A major obsession on the Left at the moment -- particularly in the universities -- is "white privilege" It is alleged that just being born white gives you privileges not available to others. And whites are supposed to feel shamed and humbled about that and -- ideally -- give all their money to non-whites. It is part of the general and quite deranged attack on mainstream people that caused many Americans to become totally disgusted with the Obama/Clinton Left. They were ready to vote for ANYBODY who would stop the rot. So Donald Trump got the job, despite his hair and many other faults.
<br />
<br />
I pointed out recently that the "white privilege" concept is racist -- very similar to Hitler's thinking about Jews. In both cases we see hostility to people purely on the basis of their race.
<br />
<br />
So let me relate a true story about a privileged person I know. L. is an elderly Jewish man who recently had a bad turn. An ambulance was called to take him to hospital. When they were loading him on board, they asked him which hospital he wanted to go to. Brisbane has some big centrally located government hospitals plus a lot of excellent private hospitals scattered about. L. said to take him to WXY, a highly regarded private hospital with about 500 beds.
<br />
<br />
But after about 15 minutes the ambulance had still not driven off. The ambulancemen said that it was a very busy time with a lot of hospitals "on bypass" (full up) -- and WXY was one of those on bypass. So the ambulancemen had been ringing around to find a hospital with an available bed. L. said not to bother with that. Just ring hospital WXY and tell them whom you have got on board. The ambulancemen did that and L. was promptly whisked to his preferred hospital. He was taken in where others were not.
<br />
<br />
So was that Jewish privilege? Many people would leap to that conclusion. And Jews are often generous donors to all sorts of charitable causes. So that could have been it. It might have reflected gratitude to a donor. But that was not it at all.
<br />
<br />
Even though he is in his '80s and has had a stroke, L. has that restless energy we so often see in Ashkenazi (Western) Jews. After his stroke he could have just stayed at home all day and watched TV. He likes watching football on TV so that would have had some appeal.
<br />
<br />
But that was just alien to him. He wanted to be active and to contribute something to others. So he became a hospital visitor. With his own recent experience of stroke he felt sympathy for people lying in bed all day waiting to get better. So, by arrangement with the WXY hospital, he would spend days just walking around the wards and looking for people who felt like a chat. He is himself a cheery, flexible, positive person who is a good listener so he brightened the days of many.
<br />
<br />
So you see why everybody at the WXY hospital knew him, appreciated him and leapt to help him when he needed it. The "privilege" he had is the privilege of being a good man. He EARNED his privilege. He is just a good natured conservative man who likes to contribute to the society in which he lives.
<br />
<br />
And so it is with most privilege. What you do to earn privilege can vary greatly. You can even inherit it. But privilege is not random and is not assigned just by something as incidental as the color of your skin. There are many trailer park denizens -- poor people -- who just get by from week to week even though they are white. Where is their privilege? It doesn't exist because they have done nothing to earn it. Just being white earns you nothing -- JR</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-5804558229080129722017-03-04T08:12:00.001-08:002017-03-04T08:16:11.443-08:00Sorry Envious Left, 'Trickle-Down' Economics Is Real, And It's Everywhere<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2017/02/05/sorry-envious-left-trickle-down-is-real-and-its-everywhere/#26f7563e6c4f">Sorry Envious Left, 'Trickle-Down' Economics Is Real, And It's Everywhere</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>The late, great Cuban immigrant Roberto Goizueta was named CEO of the Coca-Cola Company in August of 1980, and ran it until his untimely death from cancer in October of 1997. During that time, and according to a 1997 essay about him by the Wall Street Journal’s Nikhil Deogun, the market value of Coca-Cola surged from $4 billion all the way to $145 billion. Thanks to the ongoing globalization of the company’s brand on his watch, Goizueta died nearly a billionaire due to the rise in the value of Coke shares.<br />
<br />
Deogun also noted that Goizueta had little time for civic affairs in Atlanta (where Coke is based), or around the world. The alleged “social justice” measures that excite the left plainly didn’t spark excitement within Goizueta. Deogun reported that the CEO focused his energies almost singularly on enriching the shareholders he served. Thank goodness for Goizueta.<br />
<br />
Indeed, thanks to the stupendous rise in the value of Coke shares, Atlanta’s Emory University now has one of the largest endowments in the world that has made it possible for the school to give out plentiful scholarships to needy applicants, not to mention all the buildings and professorships Coca-Cola wealth has funded. Atlanta’s Robert Woodruff Foundation, massively enriched by its Coke holdings, has given out many hundreds of millions with an eye toward “investing in health, education, economic opportunity, and community vitality” in Georgia. Maybe most appealing of all from a human interest standpoint, is the story relayed by Deogun about retired Atlanta pediatrician Bill Warren. Warren inherited Coca-Cola shares, and during Goizueta’s time as CEO saw the value his inheritance soar. Enriched by the stratospheric rise in Coke shares, Warren closed his pediatric practice in order to devote his time to helping inner-city Atlanta families with their medical struggles.<br />
<br />
This story always springs to mind when pundits and/or politicians attack “tax cuts for the rich.” When they do, the alleged lie that is “trickle-down economics” is trotted out to pour cold water on more economic freedom for the economically productive and/or the prosperously born. And while anecdote should never be confused with fact, the story of Coca-Cola helps disprove the emotional arguments against trickle down. With Coke we see how an immigrant rose to near billionaire status in concert with voluminous job creation, staggering amounts of educational and charitable opportunity, and even more giving by the inheritors of great wealth.<br />
<br />
Importantly, the story hardly ends with Coke and Goizueta. If anyone doubts this, they need only walk the streets of American cities, along with the campuses of American universities. Cities are rich with hospitals and hospital wings named after rich donors, along with museums and all manner of other cultural enhancements. A look at society pages in newspapers and magazines reveals splashy parties for the rich that lead to huge charitable donations directed toward those who aren’t. As for universities, visitors are quite simply overrun with evidence of rich donors (earned and inherited) funding countless buildings, chairs, stadiums, scholarships, athletic scholarships, gymnasiums, etc.<br />
<br />
Considering a city like Seattle, while prosperous today, in the early 1970s it was essentially left for dead. Formerly a manufacturing locale, the departure of the factory work of the past (are you listening, Donald Trump?) rendered the Emerald City the 70s version of Detroit. But then Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Seattle natives both, relocated what was then called Micro-Soft from Albuquerque, NM to their hometown. A city once on its back soon enough became a destination for the talented. The economy in Seattle rages to this day (success begets success and talent, including Jeff Bezos’s decision to locate Amazon in Seattle), and individuals of varied skills find abundant work opportunities. And while some may disagree with his decision to pull so much of his wealth out of economy, living standard and life-enhancing production, Gates, the richest man in the world, is a prominent player in The Giving Pledge whereby billionaires promise to give away at least half of their wealth to charity.<br />
<br />
Notable about Gates is that his software innovations helped lead a surge in personal computer ownership. While IBM’s first mainframe computer retailed for over $1 million in the 1960s, thanks to Gates and other billionaires like Michael Dell, exponentially more powerful computers can be had today for under $200. Considering automobiles, before Henry Ford they were as rare as millionaires; meaning near non-existent. Ford grew rich transforming the unimaginable-to-own auto into a common good; his cars powered by gasoline brought to market by the arguably the richest man in history: John D. Rockefeller. Notable about Rockefeller is an earlier fortune for him sprung from his having made kerosene broadly affordable. Days that used to end at night were soon extended by light. Nowadays the superrich arouse our envy since they fly private jets while we suffer the indignity of the TSA. Ok, but readers can rest assured that there’s a billionaire in our not-too-distant future who will get that way by virtue of creating airplanes for the masses. Bank on it.<br />
<br />
Trickle-down is a hoax? Let’s be serious. If by trickle-down we mean that all of our lives get better the more that individuals grow exceedingly rich, then it must be said that trickle-down quite simply is. To deny its reality amounts to willful blindness. And it's more than trickle down. It's realistically a flood. As the definition of rich surges into the stratosphere, the lives of everyone improve markedly. Life would be unrelentingly cruel without the rich, whether earned or inherited.</blockquote>Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-72614165259675524632017-03-01T12:05:00.002-08:002017-03-01T12:05:31.774-08:00Bill Nye’s Embarrassing Face-off with Tucker Carlson on Climate Change<blockquote>
Since the premiere of his new nighttime show, Carlson has frequently confronted the dogma of man-made global warming, pushing “experts” to cite data and evidence to back up their claims rather than allowing them to repeat well-worn platitudes about a scientific consensus and the planet’s impending doom. In January, Tucker took on California State University professor Joseph Palermo, who wrote, “If President Trump and his cohort believe the science of global warming is bogus, then they shouldn’t be allowed to use the science of the Internet for their Twitter accounts” based on the commonly accepted factoid that “98 percent of all scientists” believe the climate is changing because of human activity. When Carlson repeatedly asked Palermo to give the source of that figure, which Carlson correctly said was unknowable, the professor couldn’t do it. Climate fail. <br />
<br />
But it was Carlson’s takedown of Bill Nye the Science Guy, a television personality and celebrity climate promoter, that exposes the intellectual chicanery behind this crusade. During an interview on Carlson’s show on February 27, Nye goofily claimed that people who question claims about global warming suffer from cognitive dissonance: “We in the science community are looking for information why climate change deniers, or extreme skeptics, do not accept the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” Nye went on to say that denial is denial, the evidence is overwhelming, and the question of whether humans are causing climate change is “not an open question, it’s a settled question.” <br />
<br />
Now usually when these charges are made by someone who purports to possess expertise in climate science (Nye has a degree in mechanical engineering), the interviewer acquiesces, immediately surrendering the debate to the climate activist. But Carlson wouldn’t back down: “To what degree is climate change caused by human activity? . . . Is it 100 percent, is it 74.3 percent? If it’s settled science, please tell us to what degree human activity is responsible.” <br />
<br />
Nye started to get uncomfortable, well aware he had no certain answer to this so-called settled question, since climate scientists cannot agree how much human activity contributes to climate change. (Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is suitably vague on this issue; the IPCC’s 2013 report states that it is “extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.”) <br />
<br />
This is when Nye went off the rails, refusing to specify the degree to which people cause climate change and instead blaming us for the speed that climate change is happening: “Instead of happening at time scales of millions of years or let’s say 15,000 years, it’s happening on a time scale of decades and now years.” Or, you know, whatever. He went on to tell Carlson humans are “100 percent” responsible for the rate of climate change and it’s happening catastrophically fast. This spun him into a really weird (and unscientific) spot where he started lamenting the fact that global warming has caused us to avoid another Ice Age — perhaps unaware that most people would consider freezing to death a horrible fate — and told Carlson another Ice Age “ain’t gonna happen because of you and me.” Yay CO2! <br />
<br />
Sensing he was getting cornered by Carlson, Nye pivoted to the next tactic often used by uninformed and misleading climate activists: the personal attack. “Let me ask you this. Why aren’t you concerned about it? Don’t you have four children? Why aren’t you concerned about climate change?” Because if you don’t care about climate change, you don’t care about your children. <br />
<br />
Then right before my eyes, Nye turned into my old college political-science professor, who — no matter what the subject was at the time — would end his lecture by ranting about the Vietnam War. Nye babbled about the weather back in 1750, grape growers in Europe, pesticides in the Midwest, and something about pine-bark beetles in Wyoming. (This is another common tactic of climate alarmists, they talk over you while throwing out unverifiable factoids that make them sound informed when they’re usually just making stuff up.) <br />
<br />
While it’s easy to dismiss Nye’s interview as a kooky one-off appearance from an unprepared celebrity scientist, he sadly represents the lack of integrity by most climate-change pushers. They move goalposts, manufacture facts, resist honest debate, and resort to smear tactics when confronted with specific questions they cannot answer. As Carlson said to Nye, “You really don’t know, and you bully people who ask questions.” Good thing Carlson is there to bully back for once.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-61791596634132106302017-02-25T20:41:00.000-08:002017-02-25T20:41:11.334-08:00Blackballed from BayconFrom <a href="http://delarroz.com/?p=431">The Writings of Jon Del Arroz</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
A couple of weeks ago, I found out that I had been blackballed from speaking at my own home convention, a place I’ve loved and cherished for almost a decade. This was a wanton act of discrimination, and perhaps more importantly, a show of utter disinterest in promoting prominent local science fiction authors. With a supposed emphasis on diversity, this act done to a Hispanic author casts an even darker shadow. It’s about as disturbing as it gets to see folk that you considered friends for years treat you with that level of disregard, while in the same stripe ignoring attendees who deliver me death threats.<br />
<br />
Most shockingly, the event organizers (of whom I know very well and very personally) in question did not respond personally, but delivered a form letter to explain the ostracization. It’s disingenuous and displays a dismissal and dehumanization of which I could hardly conceive.<br />
<br />
From a global health of fandom perspective, it leads me to the question: if an organization such as the Bay Area Science Fiction Convention doesn’t stand for Bay Area authors, and doesn’t care about Science Fiction first and foremost, what is the point of the organization? If other cons across the country are operating similarly, does a change need to occur?<br />
<br />
I’ll get to the answers in a moment, but first, a little background on who I am, if you are a first-time reader. I’ve spoken, between Baycon (as it is called in the vernacular) and sister convention Con-Volution, at Bay Area Sci-Fi programming every year since 2012, which culminated in getting me stints at San Diego Comic-Con to present on panels for back to back years. My speaking has garnered me much positive feedback, actual quotes from attendees facebook messages: “great job moderating, I know that one was hard” and “that was the most fun panel of my life!” I’m a high energy person, and can be the life of the party, beloved by a large contingent of the local community. So what happened? Is my work less relevant this year than in years past?<br />
<br />
Last November, four short months ago, after having worked hard for the Doomtown: Reloaded card game with their story and flavor for two years, I finally released my first novel. It’s science fiction, space opera to be precise, and has stirred a lot of the sci-fi and gaming community readerships alike, met with these sorts of accolades:<br />
<br />
<i><b>Big Name Authors:</b><br />
“This game-related novel is a lively, action-filled tale that should appeal to those who want a space adventure romp with intrigue and a touch of romance.” – Elizabeth Moon, Heris Serrano and Paksenarrion novels<br />
<br />
“A classic space opera with all of the trappings, plus an engaging story and characters you can root for; have fun!” <br />
<br />
– S.D. Perry, author of Star Trek: Avatar and the Resident Evil novelizations<br />
<br />
“Jon Del Arroz is a promising new writer with a knack for story and an interesting voice.”<br />
—Jody Lynn Nye, author of the Wolfe Pack series<br />
<br />
“Jon Del Arroz has a novel I’m eager to take a look at…” – Deadlands and Savage Worlds creator, Shane Hensley<br />
<br />
“A ripping good space thriller!” – Nebula Award Winner Elizabeth Ann Scarborough<br />
<br />
<b>Reader Reviews (35 so far with a 4.7/5 star rating on Amazon):</b><br />
“This book has everything a science fiction love would want”<br />
<br />
“Great read!!!!”<br />
<br />
“This is really deep stuff. I feel like I can go into your book for hours. Reminds me of Ender’s Game.”<br />
<br />
“An excellent sci-fi adventure story that builds an intriguing vision of the future.”<br />
<br />
Never heard of Star Realms until this book was given as a suggested read, so I had no background to draw upon. Stands alone easily! Well thought out plot and very engaging characters.</i><br />
<br />
All pretty amazing feedback for the book (which you can vote for for Dragon Award Best Military Science Fiction and Fantasy here: http://application.dragoncon.org/dc_fan_awards_signup.php ). Exciting stuff, and with a popular app-game attached to it, one would think that a local science fiction convention would be clamoring to make sure I attend, especially if I’ve provided them with hours of hard work in the past. The book should merit a legendary party in its honor, up in the hotel that goes til the wee hours of the morning.<br />
<br />
But the convention, despite their namesake, has changed so it’s no longer about Bay Area authors. It’s not about Science Fiction either. One only has to go back to their last few years of programming to see what matters to the powers that be who have taken it over: it’s a place where politics transcend everything. You’re just as wont to find panels about “Combating Creationism”, “Climate Change Scenarios”, or “Diversity and Women”, and even on the appropriately themed programming, you’ll see guests like David Gerrold ranting about evil conservatives and hijacking innocuous topics. Looking at the Twitter feed of this year’s guest of honor, 95% of his posts are political attacks, so we can expect more of the same. What’s lacking is energetic talks about fun of Science Fiction. Ironically, when I first came to the scene, organizers saw my name as Hispanic and knowing little about me, placed me on programming that amounted to an hour and a half of complaining about how hard it is for minorities in fiction. <br />
<br />
Believe me, I know how hard it is as the target of soft-blackballing like this. <br />
<br />
The reason I was disinvited was because it is well known that I support the President of the United States, duly elected and all, and that I’m happy about the way the country is being run. You know, like most normal people are. That’s the only thing that’s changed between then and now. It’s the same dangerous rhetoric out there that many of these folk who run the convention post on such a consistent basis that has turned Facebook from a “fun catching up with friends” website to a hellhole of fear, anger and hate (which as Master Yoda taught us, leads to suffering!). It’s impossible to communicate anymore, and as such, there is a small but vocal power structure of people in the convention scene and publishing that can’t tolerate the concept of seeing my pretty face. I am a minority that’s been discriminated against, not because of my race, but because of my ideas. In Science Fiction, ideas are everything, and it’s frightening to think about those being shut down as a consequence. These people want my career to fail, and they believe they can accomplish that by silencing me and giving me the cold shoulder.<br />
<br />
What they didn’t count on is this: they picked on someone who’s not the type to go down quietly and let them win with this kind of behavior. I don’t care about the odds and I don’t care about social pressure. I’m going to fight my hardest, even if I’m down 28-9 in the middle of the third quarter, when the commentators relentlessly tell me there’s no path to victory. Some things are worth fighting for, even in conditions like those. And I know how to win.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Baycon and its sister convention Con-Volution have been headed down this path for years, and I have heard stories about how local cons across the nation are facing similar problems. When conventions stop being about fun, and start being about grievance and hate, less and less people attend. They’ve been seeing this trend go on for years without a clear solution, as local comic-cons, anime cons, gaming cons and the like have skyrocketed in membership. Each year I keep seeing the same people ask why, and the answer is right in front of their faces. Each year, they double down with hyper-charged political programming, presenting only one side.<br />
<br />
When you turn something that is fun, something that people pay good money to come connect and enjoy into something, only to be faced with a browbeating, angry, and exclusive situation, you lose people. Here in California, the splits seem so extreme perhaps they think they can get away with it, but by disinviting rising prominent local authors like myself, they’re still sending a message to 40% of people that they’re not welcome. They’ll also find themselves losing the elusive “middle” as they see this and figure they would rather spend time at one of those other cons where they can just have fun and not get preached to. With a theme this year of “Utopia/Dystopia”, and the guest mentioned above, I can only imagine how bad the political ranting and preaching is going to get. Why can’t we return to the the sense of wonder of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, or Orson Scott Card that used to be brought to us in rich tradition? Those alternative voices would be shouted down in today’s environment.<br />
<br />
It’s my policy to not complain about something unless I am working toward and presenting a solution. So do I have one? Absolutely. It’s simple, and can be applied across the field. Focus on Science Fiction. Support local authors. Reach out, don’t turn away. You’re not in a movie “fighting nazis” and doing good for the world by making a politically charged anger-fest and ignoring anyone who’s not on board with that. You’re just attempting to hurt people who disagree with you, and failing at it. Removing that element is simple, and we can all find commonality together pretty easily like we did in years past, and leave grievances behind. We can work together to create smiling loyal friends instead of sad, kicked puppies. Together, we can make Science Fiction smart again, make Science Fiction fun again, make Science Fiction great again! </blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-46953010301331664612017-02-25T20:28:00.001-08:002017-02-25T20:29:36.350-08:00According To Hoyt<a href="https://feedly.com/i/entry/mEQqBMKkJBff6+ZXcW4Eou7a46HS98pgUlr5LVaBQtI=_15a28fa90d1:6653e9:acdcee0a">According To Hoyt</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
No, I’m not going to rehash the problem that raising minimum wage means fewer entry jobs, which over time make for fewer people who even have the (timeliness, work) habits to hold a job, which, over time, impoverishes a society and leads to more welfare. This is a classic “kindness can be cruel” paradox, impenetrable to do gooders who operate on feels.<br />
<br />
Being the world’s worst-ever person (but I have to share the trophy with Kate) I’m not even going to rehash the whole “but people can’t live on minimum wage” controversy. It’s true in most states of the Union (but not all) most single people can barely squeak by on minimum wage. It’s also true that you can’t raise a family on it (but then why should minimum wage earners be sole-earners when no one else can afford to be?) though this is somewhat mitigated by earned income credits, or at least it was the year when that was about our income. Being the world’s worst person I’m just going to say “Good, it’s an incentive to move up the ladder.” I’m also going to note that even in the current economy and for struggling millenials, everyone I know who got a minimum wage level job was making more within a year.<br />
<br />
I’m going to admit there are cases of people trying to raise a family on minimum wage. There are also cases of people trying to raise a family on nothing. The problem of poverty and/or lack of ambition is not an easy one to solve, and hard cases make bad law. Lousy social programs, too. Minimum wage is one such, having far more horrible than good consequences.<br />
<br />
Having a minimum wage at all is a left-hand policy, one that believes individuals, left on their own, will mercilessly exploit other humans beings, who, left on their own, have no recourse but taking it.<br />
<br />
Like most such policies, and outside certain places and times, it is daft and more than a little presumptuous. It assumes that one side is needlessly villainous, and the other side is completely helpless, BUT the bureaucrat, without the slightest knowledge of the business of one or the skills of the other has the right information to set “minimum wages.”<br />
<br />
Sure men try to make as great a profit as they can on their business, which includes paying employees as little as they can get away with. This means in practicality that they pay as little as they can to ensure a valuable worker isn’t poached by the next guy over.<br />
<br />
This means when you start out, unless you have extensive preparation (and sometimes even then. I’ve heard beginning engineers are a net DRAIN) you aren’t worth much and you get paid very little indeed. (I worked for two years for just over $2 an hour.) But, as your skill increases, and particularly your skill at your particular employment, your wage is raised, to prevent you finding someone who will pay you more. Somewhere there, it will find its equilibrium, aka, what you’re worth.<br />
<br />
This works for writers, who as contract workers have no minimum wage, for instance, and our advance often gets raised when we hit a new sales milestone, just so we won’t wander off to house B and say “Hey, do you need a novel?”<br />
<br />
Yes, again, there are those people who will be exploited. (There are people who ARE helpless and absent a kind-hearted boss will make next to nothing.) But I submit it would be easier to have a more robust earned income supplementation than to distort our economy with A minimum wage law of any kind. (Yeah, I’m a libertarian. A man can seduce me by whispering in my ear “Taxation is theft.” BUT I’m also aware that some evils will always be with us, and that we’re not getting rid of redistribution. Envy and its effects are a monkey-sin. I’d just be happy if government meddling did LESS harm.)<br />
<br />
As I’ve said before, economics is a science. Trying to legislate it makes as much sense as legislating the law of gravity or the rate of rain fall. It might make you feel good, but it doesn’t work that way.<br />
<br />
The way it works is by seeking other channels, which include being paid “under the table”, forcing other employees to work unpaid hours (trust me, it can be done, particularly in a bad economy) and firing the dead weight, and … hiring illegal labor.<br />
<br />
The US doesn’t have an illegal immigration problem. The US has a minimum wage problem.<br />
<br />
Given our large and unguarded border (yes, wall, but how much will be built and how much will it stop armed coyotes and drug smugglers) with a country where the cost of living and wages are MUCH lower, paying $10 an hour (let alone $15) means you’ve built an attractive nuisance. This is like having a pool without a fence or any barriers that might attract neighborhood children who can’t swim.<br />
<br />
The minimum wage will attract otherwise honest people, cause them to risk their lives, feed illegal businesses and break the law. People will break every law to get here, because at that rate, and living 20 men to an apartment, they can send home enough to keep their wife and children in luxury. You can’t stop men from coming over and trying to do that, particularly when the pay is for illegal work. You just can’t. It’s a biological imperative for a father to take care of his brood.<br />
<br />
On top of that there’s the corruption of the employer. Oh, sure, if you’re hiring them with fake social security numbers, you’re paying minimum wage. Probably. Only they’re illegal, and it’s easy to make them work double time. Or you know you don’t have to declare exactly how much they worked and pay benefits. They’re not going to file for taxes. A lot of employers will also hire under the table and pay less than minimum wage.<br />
<br />
We also can’t stop the employer doing that, not even if the employer is otherwise an honest man and devoted to the nation. Why not?<br />
<br />
Because in many cases we’d be requiring them to kill off their business. I understand many agricultural businesses simply can’t afford to pay minimum wage and stay in business. At any rate, the attractive nuisance law applies again. All it takes is some employers not being too scrupulous and hiring illegal workers. Then the illegal workers allow these employers to lower the price of their product.<br />
<br />
The end result is forcing everyone in that field to hire illegal workers. Rumors that Toni Weisskopf drove by a home depot and said “I need to people to write novels” and Larry and I jumped in the back of the truck are somewhat exaggerated, but a similar effect is seen in my field, not from illegal laborers but from academicians moving into writing. When someone starts writing science fiction to pad her university resume, she’ll take an absurdly low advance, now down to something like 3k per novel. This is not her income, or even a decent part of her income, it’s just a satisfaction to “publish and perish.” The ability to pay that low an advances forces down all the advances across the field. It is not the sole explanation for why advances declined from a living wage in the forties and fifties to “money for some pizzas” now, but it is a portion of it. What it did to the field wasn’t pretty in terms of quality either.<br />
<br />
What illegal labor does to the fields it takes over is not pretty either. There is a lot less investment into working at very low wages in a foreign land, as a worker who will move around a lot, and who doesn’t care what his record is, than in building a career. There is a reason we joke about things built by “Manuel labor” and their inherent shoddiness.<br />
<br />
And the way to get rid of it is not a wall, nor enhanced verification. When you have an attractive nuisance of this magnitude, the neighbors will be attracted, and man is a clever ape. Humans will find a way.<br />
<br />
The way to get rid of illegal immigration is to get rid of minimum wage and supplement the income of the truly needy in other ways.<br />
<br />
What are the chances of getting rid of this bad idea whose time should never have come, but which has been with us for over a hundred years?<br />
<br />
So. About that wall. How much do you think it will cost to build and guard?</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-86371403601868819502017-02-24T18:30:00.001-08:002017-02-24T18:31:04.260-08:00How the ctrl-Left drove me away from American liberalism | Brad R. Torgersen<a href="https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/how-the-ctrl-left-drove-me-away-from-american-liberalism/">How the ctrl-Left drove me away from American liberalism | Brad R. Torgersen</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
A good friend of mine, who also happens to be an outstanding author, once quipped, “If I am forced to choose a side, I choose the side which is not forcing me to choose sides.”<br />
<br />
Seldom have I ever encountered phrasing more apt. Because that’s precisely how I feel. I’ve been feeling that way, for years now. It was not a sudden thing. It was a gradual realization. The slow clarity of an underlying sentiment, incrementally surfacing.<br />
<br />
To make the picture more specific, let me lay out some background details. This is a bit wordy, so bear with me:<br />
<br />
When I first met my wife in 1992, we were both volunteering at community radio station KRCL-FM in Salt Lake City, Utah. Back then, KRCL was something of a tentpole organization for folk who styled themselves as counter-culture. It was staffed with an oddball assortment of old-school Hippies, new-school progressives, the occasional play-anarchist, plenty of environmentalists, a few gays and lesbians, a tiny handful of non-caucasians (my future wife among them) as well as one or two small-c conservatives and small-l libertarians who worked very hard to keep their political cards held close to their chests; at least around the other staff. George Carlin was arguably my favorite comedian. I was attending the University of Utah, having turned down an Army recruiter the year before.<br />
<br />
In other words, I was the proverbial sapling, with his roots sunk into decidedly progressive soil.<br />
<br />
By the end of 1996, my wife and I had moved to the Puget Sound in Washington State, we were again involved with a public radio station — I was student program director of KSVR-FM from 1995 to 1998 — and I had just voted in my second U.S. Presidential election, selecting Bill Clinton for a second term. I didn’t think Bob Dole was a bad guy, but I tended to pick Democrats in most categories. Why not? Nothing in my life had convinced me that the Democrats weren’t “my” party. And I was surrounded by men and women who all felt the same way. New Dimensions was my favorite weekly talk program, and I was an avid Carl Sagan fan. Being in an interracial marriage practically made me a Democrat by default, though I did not ever sign up with the party, because I liked to be able to keep my options open — and not feel like I “owed” my vote to anybody. I was (and remain) pro-choice, as well as pro-legalization (rec drugs) even though I am an LDS teetotaler of same.<br />
<br />
For the year 2000 I voted Al Gore — and was quite upset about Bush 43’s win, as some of my friends from the old incarnation of the ESPN Utah Jazz message forum may recall.<br />
<br />
All of which is to say, I may not have been a card-carrier, but I was as reliable a constituent as any Democratic Party planner could have hoped for — a liberal by any reasonable definition of the period. Living in a liberal part of the country, too.<br />
<br />
But . . . things had already begun to shift, even if I myself did not yet realize it.<br />
<br />
Again, let me lay out some background details:<br />
<br />
I’d watched the unfolding of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and could not understand why so many determined liberals and especially feminists, were so willing to give Bill Clinton a pass. Yeah, sure, I voted for the guy too, but voting for a guy and lending him blind license to ill, are not the same thing. I was pretty sure (then, as well as now) if Bob Dole had been in Clinton’s place, everyone defending Clinton, would have crucified Dole. Bill Clinton (and his ardent defenders) let me down as a result.<br />
<br />
Likewise, I’d had a front-row seat for the WTO riots in Seattle. Beyond the disruption those riots caused — at the time, I was working at One Union Square — I couldn’t understand what the rioters hoped to accomplish. They seemed to be protesting anything and everything. There was no coherency. Likewise, there was no discipline. Window-smashers assaulted downtown businesses, while anarchists baited the police into overreacting. Crowds pushed up the ramps near the convention center, trying to block I-5. Public transportation was blocked and vandalized too. It seemed to me I was witnessing, not a dedicated movement for change, but a kind of ritualistic cultural event — for all those who felt like the need to express themselves outweighed actually trying to accomplish a goal with measurable metrics. I was very turned off by the whole episode.<br />
<br />
Of course, then came the morning when some nice Middle Eastern gentlemen of a certain religious affiliation converted four full airliners into cruise missiles aimed at U.S. targets on U.S. soil. I’ll never forget that day. Even though I was on the other side of the country. It was the moment when many of my conventional wisdoms — about how people, and the world, work — began to spectacularly unravel.<br />
<br />
Because none of the Left-wing reactions to September 11, 2001, made any sense to me.<br />
<br />
College professors called for solidarity with the terrorists. Liberals were openly self-blaming the United States for the event. Conspiracy theorists said it was an inside job by Bush, to fool us into going to war. People once again lamented the fact Gore had had the Presidency “stolen” from him — because what was needed most of all, was a President who could go to the United Nations and repent before the world; on account of America’s long history of sordid capitalistic colonialist nationalist imperialism. Or something along those lines.<br />
<br />
My reaction to it all was to openly say, “What the f***?!”<br />
<br />
The United States — indeed, the liberal West as a whole — had been brutally attacked! Thousands died!<br />
<br />
Yet the Left blamed us for the thing? We were the bad guys??!<br />
<br />
Clearly, there was a major malfunction happening — at the ideological level.<br />
<br />
And the more I began to openly criticise these Left-wing reactions — including my adamant insistence that Gore would have been compelled to go into Afghanistan, just as Bush had been — the more hostility I encountered. And not just theoretically, either. I mean from people I worked with, went to school with, and also had become friends with. The culture of King County was going in one direction about the whole event, and I was going in a different direction. The more time went on, the wider the gap between these two trajectories became.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
By the end of 2002, I was signed up with the Army Reserve. Me, they guy who’d been talked out of joining ten years prior, because my Dad knew I was an easy-going fellow who liked to take it easy, and Dad was convinced I’d hate military life.<br />
<br />
Dad was right, too. I am not a natural serviceman. It’s an existence quite foreign to my sensibilities. But I signed up anyway, because 9/11 felt to me like my generation’s version of Pearl Harbor. To arms, young men! Do not be caught standing on the sideliness of history! Take up the flag of your country, right or wrong! That sort of thing. I had no illusion I’d be any kind of Rambo. When I joined, I had bad eyes, a bad knee, was very sedentary, and did not possess any talent for tactical training like the Army employs. I wouldn’t be an infantry rock star. I just wanted to help out, in whatever capacity they’d have me. Because that’s my general instinct in most crises: I simply want to assist, in tangible ways that count, versus merely being somebody who gets pissed off on the internet.<br />
<br />
Trajectories, continuing to diverge. The ground lurches beneath the tree?<br />
<br />
Seattle Democrats took an election away from Dino Rossi. Who won fairly — if narrowly — in the Washington race for governor. The Democrats of King County demanded a recount, then set about inventing ballots for Rossi’s competitor all along the way, and once they put Christine Gregoire over the top, magically the results became legit.<br />
<br />
These Democrats didn’t even try to hide what they were doing. They crowed about it, exclaiming, “We’re just getting revenge for what Bush did in 2000!”<br />
<br />
There was the woman on the street who said, “Go Army, rape those Iraqis!” when she saw me wearing my Army sweatshirt outside my apartment complex on Lake City Way. This somewhat startling comment would be reminded to me a couple of years later, when a classmate at Seattle Central Commun(ist) College told me it was a shame I signed up with the Reserve, because my job was to kill people. Uhhhh, what? Since when does being an HR Specialist at a Garrison Support Unit involve killing people? It got even worse when the students at SCCC began throwing water bottles at Army recruiters, as well as destroying Army recruiter literature. The students ran the recruiters off campus — and cheered themselves doing it!<br />
<br />
Those of us who were military, and attending, wondered how long it would be before we ourselves became targets.<br />
<br />
This was about the time a one-man protest operation named ReplacementsNeeded! was covering every light and utility pole in the First Hill and Capitol Hill area, with quasi-anarchist, anti-military agit prop posters. They were vulgar, ghastly, and inflammatory, and they stretched from the sidewalk to seven feet above the pavement. Every. Single. Pole. Within about a two mile radius, give or take. He never cleaned up after himself. He fled Seattle with $10,000.00 in fines on his head, unpaid, then bitched on-line about how Evergreen State College wasn’t progressive enough for him. I think he’s since left the States altogether? I am not sure. I know he never took down any of his signs, despite the city ordnance.<br />
<br />
Anyway, anti-military and anti-Bush protest marches were also routinely sprouting from the Capitol Hill district, usually kicking off at SCCC and meandering their way through downtown streets, leaving a wake of debris and sometimes damage to public and private property.<br />
<br />
Like when they defended Clinton in 1998, I was severely let down by the liberal behavior I witnessed and experienced, after I joined the military. Nobody seemed to care if it was organized, or not. Nobody seemed to question the sense of attacking soldiers because the attackers hated the President. Feelings mattered more than facts. The ends justified the means. They were proud of it, too.<br />
<br />
The tree finds itself standing still, as the sod runs like a river to the left . . .<br />
<br />
Needless to say, I voted Bush for his second term. First time ever for me, selecting a Republican in a Presidential race. Even I was surprised. I had been unhappy with the Bush win four years earlier. But the nation was at war. I’d always thought that failing to remove Saddam Hussein — in 1990/1991 — was a mistake. The 2003 Iraq invasion seemed like the U.S. was simply taking care of long-unfinished business. And Kerry? Goodness, how in he world was I supposed to take that man seriously? He seemed to embody everything that had been going haywire (in my opinion) with American politics, in the wake of 9/11. He’d thrown his medals over the White House fence when it was politically expedient, and now he was “reporting for duty” and saluting at the DNC, when it was politically expedient.<br />
<br />
I did not trust John Kerry to lead the country any better than Bush had. So, while I did not think Bush was flawless — he wasn’t — I thought he was the better option. Just as I’d thought Clinton was the better option, years before.<br />
<br />
But, to be an “outted” Bush voter in Seattle, was to be an unwanted alien — living and working in the Puget Sound I-5 corridor.<br />
<br />
I had betrayed the zeitgeist of the region.<br />
<br />
Eventually, my wife and I moved back to Utah. Not because of the politics, but because of the cost of living. For an area that prides itself on being merciful to people who don’t have a lot of money, the Puget Sound I-5 corridor is a wickedly expensive place to try to function on a single income; when you’ve got a wife and child to house and feed. Plus, we knew my Mom and Dad would be needing some assistance soon, and it was far easier for us to go to them, than for them to come to us.<br />
<br />
But when the Obama election rolled around later that same year, even being in Utah was not sufficient to insulate me from the same attitudes I used to face routinely in the Puget Sound. Because suddenly, if you weren’t fainting to the ground with love and adoration for Saint Obama, you weren’t just called stupid, you were declared evil. You were RACIST! Because nobody could not vote for Obama, without being a RACIST! could they? Of course not. Both the media and the Obama voters let all of us — in poor dumb hick fly-over country — know just what kind of reprobates we were. For not being on board the Obama bandwagon.<br />
<br />
And I didn’t even vote for McCain. He seemed like a dud to me. Nor was I impressed with Obama, who seemed like he was all flash, but little substance. I wrote in Mitt Romney for (P) and Condi Rice for (VP) knowing I was “throwing away” my vote. It had not been the first time, nor would it be the last.<br />
<br />
Didn’t matter to the Obama zealots, of course. Nor did my marriage. Everybody who was not 110% pro-Obama, was magically painted with the RACIST! brush. This was a fact, the zealots said. We were all RACIST! It was declared over, and over, and over again. Apparently this made my wife a RACIST! too, against her own “kind” — because she voted third party in 2008, as she has often done over the years (she’s just an independent gal like that, and was not impressed with Obama either.)<br />
<br />
So, did Obama eventually win me over, the way Clinton and Bush had won me over?<br />
<br />
No. Obama cut arbitrary deals with Wall Street and the banks. The economy — already headed into the hole — crashed and burned. He paid lip service to promises made on the campaign trail — closing Guantanamo bay, removing U.S. troops entirely from places like Iraq — while courting the favor of vocal elites in academia, the media, and the entertainment industry. He loved being treated like a rock star, because in reality he was still just that nerdy, underachieving, culturally-white black kid; who had to affect a ghetto accent when politically touring dilapidated inner-city streets he never lived on.<br />
<br />
But damn if Obama didn’t make his Leftist white voters feel spectacular about themselves, for having voted for him!<br />
<br />
Apparently this was the sole great benefit of re-voting for Obama again in 2012: being able to proclaim your awesomeness as a human being, for having re-elected Teh Furst Black Presadent.<br />
<br />
I am sounding mighty cynical at this point, am I not? But wait, there’s more.<br />
<br />
By late 2015, I was overseas with a Joint Task Force designed to confront ISIS. We watched Obama effectively yank the cord on our mission. We also watched as Hillary Clinton — recently of Benghazi disaster fame — wiped the walls with Bernie Sanders. She would face Trump for the Presidency in 2016. It was a certainty that she would win. No way would Trump make it. He was an absurd candidate. Hillary was inevitable. Very few of us in that Task Force trusted her. But Trump? The reality TV star with bronze hair and orange skin? What?<br />
<br />
My UK counterpart in the Task Force, a 30+ year British Army veteran, was cannier than I was. “Mate, get ready for President Trump,” he said. I told him it was impossible. After watching Romney lose in 2012 — the only Presidential election in which I’d ever felt truly and deeply invested — I had no faith in any kind of resistance to someone like Hillary. She would cake walk her way into the Oval Office.<br />
<br />
My Brit friend turned out to be right.<br />
<br />
But not before all of us who could not stomach Hillary’s lying and duplicity in Washington D.C., got to be labeled SEXISTS!<br />
<br />
Failure to be full-blown enthusiastic about Hillary was SEXIST! We were woman-haters, all of us. Even other women, who clearly detested their own vaginas, by not supporting Hillary.<br />
<br />
Many of us would have happily voted Democrat in that race, if someone like Joe Lieberman or Jim Webb had run. I myself would have cheered a Lieberman or a Webb candidacy. I would have been all in. Hell, I was half-serious when I said I’d vote Sanders before I’d vote Trump. Remember what I said, about not wanting to “owe” a vote to anyone? The Republicans had not captured me. I was in play. And so were many other people. I know. I talked to them. It was the easiest crossover bet for the Democrats since Clinton in 1996. Surely. Because . . . Trump?! Seriously??!<br />
<br />
But no. Hillary railroaded the DNC and PWN3D the Dem primary process, tossing Bernie out on his ear. As had been the case for a long time, what Hillary wanted, Hillary got. And it didn’t matter who stood in her way.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the Left applauded, and applauded, and applauded some more.<br />
<br />
If you weren’t “With Her!” you were deplorable. Everybody who was anybody, was going out of his or her way, to wave the Hillary flag. It was wall-to-wall virtue signalling, dialed to eleven.<br />
<br />
Then came the evening of November 8, 2016. Oh my.<br />
<br />
I was as shocked by the Trump win as any other non-Trumper. Outrageous. And yet, it was nice to see an ideological inevitability — “I’m with Her!” — overturned by a republican (note the small r) process still healthy enough to stand up to a vainglorious technocrat of Hillary’s raw ambition. I mean, she did everything right. She courted celebrity opinion. She raked in the endorsements. She had corporations in her hip pocket, and billions of dollars behind her, plus a friendly media who ate out of both her hands. Academics loved her. All the Obama faithful loved her.<br />
<br />
Not loving her, was a sure sign of misogyny. Nobody wants to be a woman-hater, right? How does she not win?<br />
<br />
Apparently, by being the one candidate 63 million voters disliked even more than Donald Trump.<br />
<br />
Which of course has touched off close to 90 days of destructive political pandemonium in these United States. Denunciations. Riots. Beatings. Calls for the White House to be bombed, and for the military to rise up and overthrow the government. All from liberals. All by liberals. A righteous junta! Nevermind that the military vote went to Trump at a 3 to 1 ratio, with a large percentage of the remaining military vote going to 3rd parties. I was in the latter category.<br />
<br />
And I have been reminded every single day, just how far I’ve been pushed away — by so-called progressives in this country.<br />
<br />
Sure, some of that is me walking my talk. I am not exactly the same guy I was 25 years ago. And not because I don’t think some of the idealism of liberal thought is not worthy, or even evocatively beautiful.<br />
<br />
It is.<br />
<br />
Liberalism — the kind I was attracted to in my teens, and early twenties — mostly focuses on brighter futures with better choices.<br />
<br />
Yet at many points over the past quarter century, that shining picture of what the Left supposedly stands for, has been undermined again, and again, and again, and again, by the behavior of self-styled Leftists.<br />
<br />
Maybe it all comes down to the fact that I decided Alinsky’s ballyhooed rules are pernicious. Not once do they involve self-reflection, nor questions of higher moral obligation to a power or a need beyond simple political expediency. Like with the 2004 Washington State governors race, the ends justify the means. If you’re a Leftist and you have to lie to get what you want, then lie. If you’re a Leftist and you have to cheat to get what you want, then cheat. If you’re a Leftist and you have to hurt people to get what you want, or if you have to frighten people into not opposing you, then hurt and frighten people.<br />
<br />
Never doubt that everything you — the Leftist — says or does, is done justifiably.<br />
<br />
Everyone and everything is a fair target. Lash out. Incriminate. Slander. Punish. Make them quake in their boots. They deserve it, the jerks. “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists!” Oops, Leftists excoriated Bush 43 for saying that. Now they themselves live it every day. “If you didn’t vote for Hillary, you’re with the KKK and the Nazis!”<br />
<br />
Leftists now give all of us a political litmus test, without exception. Wrong-thinkers will be singled out for eviction from the human equation.<br />
<br />
I certainly experienced plenty of this crap during the Sad Puppies campaign, wherein us rowdy sci-fi nonconformists from Delta Tau Chi crashed the Faber homecoming parade, and all hell broke loose with the people from Omega Theta Pi.<br />
<br />
And if you’re wondering how in the world an Animal House analogy works in all of this, consider the fact that Senator Blutarsky undoubtedly switched to the Republicans after 9/11/2001. Donald Trump rallies were the toga parties of the election. The Electoral College smashed Hillary Clinton’s guitar against the stairwell wall.<br />
<br />
I don’t feel like I’ve stopped being the liberal I was at age 19 — still married to the same amazing lady, still enjoying public radio, still pro-choice, still pro-legalization, still about people having brighter futures — as much as I feel left behind.<br />
<br />
The cultural shift that’s masqueraded beneath a banner of liberalism, kicked me out. Or I walked away. Whichever.<br />
<br />
Like Hermey the elf, from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. “You can’t fire me, I quit!”<br />
<br />
Naturally, my liberal friends reading this will shake their heads from side to side, with pained expressions on their faces. “He’s got it all wrong. The Right is so much worse. They are always worse.”<br />
<br />
Hey folks, I never said the Right was perfect. Nor are the people of the Right immune to being hypocrites about a lot of things.<br />
<br />
But here’s the shocker. There is far, far more true liberalism on the American Right, in this 21st century, than inhabits the American Left.<br />
<br />
I’ll say it again: there is far more real, actual, tangible liberalism, on the American Right, at this point in time, than on the American Left. By a significant margin.<br />
<br />
This is not my opinion based on Fox News, Limbaugh, or Breitbart. I don’t watch Fox News, nor do I listen to Limbaugh, nor do I follow Breitbart. This is my opinion based on a quarter century of cumulative experience and analysis. I have reached this point, having felt the spectrum of American political discourse being dragged beneath my feet, such that many of the old-style liberal heroes of yore would be called dangerously extreme Republicans today.<br />
<br />
Doubt me? Hell, JFK was a recklessly warmongering one-percenter. Like Bush 43 and Romney rolled into one! He could not hope to win the Democratic ticket in 2017. He’d be compared to Trump, and lambasted in a similar manner. Meanwhile, Martin Luther King would be called a race traitor, for failing to embrace intersectional identity theories and their attendant anti-caucasian, anti-male, anti-straight, anti-cis hatreds — which place Victimhood (caps v) above content of character.<br />
<br />
Even the original Suffragettes would be kicked out of the Good Guy club, for their traditional opposition to abortion.<br />
<br />
In other words, there is almost nothing about the 21st century American Left, which can be accurately called liberal. No way in hell.<br />
<br />
The 21st century American Left is instead a cultural and political enforcer of both dogma, and uniformity. Which preens in the mirror each morning, celebrating its eminent superiority, and talking down to, attacking, or otherwise throwing out anyone and everyone who steps out of line.<br />
<br />
It doesn’t take much to get put on the “bad people” list. Witness all the proper progressives forever being witch-burned on our campuses, by the intersectional crybabies (in grown bodies) who demand to never be disagreed with, otherwise they’re triggered — and need to run to their safe spaces.<br />
<br />
I can’t ride in that dysfunctional clown car. It is anti-intellectual, and anti-reason. It proposes to elevate feelings above all else, and has turned victimization — both real and imagined — into a bizarre form of morally-elevated celebrity.<br />
<br />
Being a victim is now chic!<br />
<br />
Failure to abide by the dogma, gets you attacked. You can’t even criticize the dogma from a friendly standpoint, without being ejected from the tribe of propriety. You are kicked to the curb. Shamed. Shunned. Called names. They attack your friends, your family, try to get you fired from your job, and worse.<br />
<br />
I mean, good Lord, they attacked Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, because she didn’t get up on stage and pull a Madonna or an Ashley Judd.<br />
<br />
Thus Lady Gaga “failed” the movement. She is a traitor. Yes, Lady Gaga.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, you can apparently beat a woman to the ground on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, and it’s no-harm no-foul — so long as you can call that woman a “fascist” just because you feel like she’s bad, for having a different opinion.<br />
<br />
My gentle suggestion would be: the first step in fighting fascism, involves not being a fascist.<br />
<br />
“But isn’t the American Right crackers too?” Sometimes, sure. Delta Tau Chi is hardly a monolith of coherency.<br />
<br />
It’s just that, I think the ass-paddlers of Omega Theta Pi can have their black robes and their rituals of humiliation — cough, “check your privilege,” cough — while I will be over at the slum fraternity, having fun with the other deplorables. Delta Tau Chi never tells me I have to prove I am a good “ally” by debasing myself endlessly, then going on the attack against others. They also don’t demand that I model and emulate an increasingly strident and narrow form of ideological purity. They further do not believe in throwing friends to the wolves — when the torches and pitch forks of the Left arrive at the door.<br />
<br />
Omega Theta Pi — the modern American Left — are control freaks by comparison. They are in love with banning things. Outlawing words. Ideas. People. Making it a punishable offense to disagree. All while taking selfies and giving themselves squishy hugs for being such wonderful, proper, altogether forward-thinking and forward-believing human beings.<br />
<br />
And if you believe otherwise, then f*** you, you’re a RACIST! and a SEXIST! and a HOMOPHOBE! and an ISLAMOPHOBE!<br />
<br />
Which reminds me: every LDS person in good standing has become painfully aware of just how big the double-standard is, when the Left talks about religion, and religious cultures. Islam and Muslims are a protected, sacrosanct class. Mormons? F*** ’em. Racist, sexist, inbred, fanatical morons. The LDS leadership in Salt Lake City cannot utter a single peep about church policy, without it becoming an excuse for breathless Left-wing tabloid hyperventilation — about the “problem” of Mormonism. Meanwhile, Islamic radicals continue to murder on just about every continent, and violate every sacred belief in the progressive playbook, but we as a nation are piously reminded to never hold Islam or Muslims accountable. Never, ever, ever, ever. If you say otherwise, you are ISLAMOPHOBIC!<br />
<br />
And being ISLAMOPHOBIC! is almost as bad as being TRANSPHOBIC! Even though getting caught being gay or trans in many Isamic countries, is a death sentence. Or worse.<br />
<br />
But then, the modern American Left is not great at logical consistency. Thoughts don’t count. It’s the feelz.<br />
<br />
Skeptical? Check this out.<br />
<br />
Want to be a woman today, even if you’re genetically and anatomically male? Shazam! You’re a woman! Here is your golden Victim crown of identity! Nobody is allowed to say otherwise! Oh wait, women who are actually women — with lady parts and everything — cease to be women the instant they run for office as Republicans. They magically lose their melanin too. Just ask Mia Love if she’s still allowed to be black.<br />
<br />
The American Left will confiscate your gender and your ethnicity, if they catch you playing for the wrong team.<br />
<br />
Again, the pattern emerges: taking away, taking away, taking away. The modern American Left is obsessed with removing things. I don’t know how or why it came to this, but it has. They want to take away your single-occupancy vehicle. They want to take away your ability to operate your private business according to your religious convictions — except Muslims, who will get a pass. They want to take away your right to choose where your kids are schooled, and how. They want to take away your furnace, and your air conditioner — global warming, cough, climate change, cough, reasons, cough. They want to take away your options at restaurants, and also at the grocery store — you will no longer be allowed to have “bad” things in “bad” quantities. They want to take away your right to own firearms and defend yourself, your family, and your property — because only the police should have guns. Even though the same mouths claims the police are out of control and kill black people for sport.<br />
<br />
This is not liberalism. It’s contradictory, nonsensical tyranny, which dresses itself up in a ghastly pink-fuzzy bunny suit of false benevolence. Like Ralphie from Christmas Story, except he’s been zombified, and he’s going to eat you.<br />
<br />
You know what I say to that?<br />
<br />
In the immortal words of Ned and Uncle Jimbo, from South Park: IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US!<br />
<br />
Speaking of South Park, if you need any further proof that the American Left has dragged the spectrum beneath us, consider the Comedy Central fixture which went from being the prime amusement of adolescent liberals, to one of the few entertainment weapons left in the arsenal of adult conservatives (I know, I know, we’re often the same people; just two decades older.)<br />
<br />
Matt and Trey are among the few vocal entertainment pairs left, who will openly make fun of progressives and progressive gospel.<br />
<br />
Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein being another pair. I have seldom laughed harder, than while watching Portlandia.<br />
<br />
(Satire is Kryptonite to the 21st century liberal moral majority, just as it was Kryptonite to the 20th century conservative moral majority.)<br />
<br />
My bottom-line analysis? American liberalism abandoned American liberalism.<br />
<br />
I watched and felt it happen, right before my own eyes. The Left became power-drunk on their ascendant ride through our culture, and now it’s morphed into the very kind of petty, thin-skinned, tin-pot authoritarianism which the Left claims to oppose. It rejects all questioning, and seeks to revile and hurt the questioner. Look at how scientists who criticize climate change alarmism, become pariahs in their own profession — called “denialist” in an almost ritualistic fashion, by the keepers of the gnostic doctrine of the Church of Global Warming. See how women and ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians, who “come out” as conservative, or Republican, are treated as traitors. Witness business owners and executives who resign in humiliation, when they are “outed” for supporting religiously-based political initiatives that run contra to the Left-wing agenda. (Unless they’re Muslim — free pass!)<br />
<br />
Folks, I can’t truck with this. I can’t be with the authoritarian control freaks — people who fight the so-called alt-Right, by inventing an even more problematic ctrl-Left. Not even if the ctrl-Left are the heirs to history, like they always claim they are.<br />
<br />
My personal suspicion — as someone who recognizes that history is not a straight-line ramp of destiny, but rather a variable waveform of deliberate action twined with chance — is that nobody owns the future. The more hotly and adamantly somebody claims to own the future, like Khrushchev slamming his shoe at the United Nations, the more sure I am this person (or this movement) is writing its own epitaph. Authoritarians always fail. Always. If not sooner, then later. Because human beings are unruly. We seldom do as we’re told. Not even when it’s the cuddly cudgel of compassionate dictatorship banging down across our skulls.<br />
<br />
Yes, yes, I know, the American Right has had plenty of moments in that unkind spotlight too. They’re not immune to overreaching.<br />
<br />
The American Right just seems to better understand the way people and the world actually work, versus how we might wish for them to work. Thus the American Right spends a lot of its intellectual and emotional capital on concepts like individual liberty and limited government, according to the wishes of the U.S. Founders.<br />
<br />
The American Left, meanwhile, is obsessed with perfecting the human condition, using the ideas of theorists like Marx. They seek a total reformation of society, as well as the state. They are anti-Enlightenment, believing that empirical science and objective analysis are somehow RACIST! as well as SEXIST! Facts which refute the reformative theory, are to be suppressed, and the fact-finders walled out of polite discussion.<br />
<br />
The ghosts of the gulags and the killing fields tell us which of these two paradigms is sustainable, and which is not.<br />
<br />
I choose to listen to the ghosts.</blockquote>
Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8333528.post-66518635301164015892017-02-15T19:22:00.001-08:002017-03-04T08:27:05.795-08:00A RANT: I'm losing patience with the Trump Derangement crowd<a href="http://www.bookwormroom.com/2017/02/13/rant-losing-patience-trump-derangement/">A RANT: I'm losing patience with the Trump Derangement crowd</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Given my increasingly lower tolerance for the Trump Derangement crowd that inhabits Facebook, I really need to get off of Facebook entirely or I’m going to be run out of the San Francisco Bay Area before I’ve had the chance to make the move on my own terms. It’s just that, as I’ve so often said, “The stupid . . . it burns!” And the Progressives on my Facebook feed are on fire!<br />
<br />
Irritation the First: A friend put up a post bemoaning the horrors of the ICE raids against people who snuck into our country, completely bypassing our legislatively passed immigration laws. Never mind that, if you come here illegally, “you pays your money and you takes your chances.” If you don’t get caught, you’re lucky; if you do get caught, you need to be summarily evicted. That’s especially true when it turns out most of them have committed crimes in addition to their entering our country illegally.<br />
<br />
So, in light of her mourning, I posed a straightforward question: “Do you distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants?”<br />
<br />
She came back coyly: “Do you mean ‘undocumented’ immigrants?”<br />
<br />
“No,” I answered, “I mean illegal immigrants, i.e., people who have completely bypassed American immigration laws to sneak into this country, so that they are are criminals from the moment they step foot on American soil. That kind of illegal.” And moreover, I raged (or peevishly whined), I am sick of euphemisms. If we’re going down that path, let’s start calling rapists “unauthorized sex partners.” Anodyne phrases shouldn’t be allowed to erase the fundamental illegality of what’s going on here.<br />
<br />
I await being unfriended.<br />
<br />
<br />
Irritation the Second: The people who try to liken Trump’s Executive Order putting a three-month ban on immigration by non-citizens coming from dangerous countries that the Obama administration identified to the infamous Roosevelt order summarily rounding up American citizens and imprisoning them. The Supreme Court, in Korematsu, put its imprimatur on that case, and it was wrong to do so.<br />
<br />
However, there is no relationship between a Democrat depriving American citizens (sometimes second or third generation) of life, liberty, and property without due process, and a Republican president’s order, entered after escalating mass murders, putting a three-month hold on immigrants from terror supporting countries. None. Nada. No. Nicht. Nil. Nothing. Non.<br />
<br />
Moreover, the district court and the Ninth Circuit both gave the game away when they appealed to their Leftists navels for legal authority rather than to either the statute under which Trump acted (as did other presidents before him) or the Constitution that grants him this authority. And yes, I was intemperate in explaining these principles to someone who ought to have known better.<br />
<br />
Irritation the Third: Stupid Leftists with Trump Derangement Syndrome who stop reading after the headlines and think they know something. Once I’ve successfully (and, until today, politely) beaten back the factual, legal, and constitutional idiocies behind their opposition to Trump’s Executive Order, they invariably claim that Trump illegally exempted from the order immigrants from countries with which he has business ties. One person had an even more sophisticated argument, which was that, “Sure, Trump followed the list, but he trimmed it to protect his business partners.<br />
<br />
No. No. No and no. First of all, they’re obviously confusing Trump with Secretary of State Hillary and potential-President Hillary, who lived by pay for play. Second, it’s just factually untrue:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
In December 2015, President Barack Obama signed into law a measure placing limited restrictions on certain travelers who had visited Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria on or after March 1, 2011. Two months later, the Obama administration added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen to the list, in an effort, the administration said, to address “the growing threat from foreign terrorist fighters.”<br />
<br />
The restrictions specifically limited what is known as visa-waiver travel by those who had visited one of the seven countries within the specified time period. People who previously could have entered the United States without a visa were instead required to apply for one if they had traveled to one of the seven countries.<br />
<br />
Under the law, dual citizens of visa-waiver countries and Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria could no longer travel to the U.S. without a visa. Dual citizens of Libya, Somalia, and Yemen could, however, still use the visa-waiver program if they hadn’t traveled to any of the seven countries after March 2011.</blockquote>
<br />
Sure, the same article goes on to say that Trump’s ban is broader, but that’s within his unique constitutional prerogative. Having concluded that Obama made a good start in identifying countries possessed of citizens who expose America to unaccepted risks, incoming President Trump could also have concluded that Obama reacted with pitiful inadequacy to that risk. As Obama himself remarked, “Elections have consequences.” Obama got to try it his way (and it sucked) and the new president gets to try it his way (and I hope it works).<br />
<br />
I’m sorry (well, not very sorry, but a little sorry) to admit that, after that those three irritations, I went into full bitch mode against the gal who claimed Trump was using the ban to benefit his business empire. I accused the writer, who normally is very open-minded, of falling prey to propaganda and encouraged him to do what I do: Read everything from both sides of the political aisle. I assured him that he’d quickly discover that reputable conservatives sites are (a) better written; (b) more analytical; (c) possessed of more accurate facts; (d) less vulgar; and (e) less racist (much less racist because they’re not obsessed with race). I’m waiting now to be unfriended.<br />
<br />
It was one thing to put up with Progressives’ stupid Obama gloats. It was all about feelings anyway.<br />
<br />
It’s another thing entirely to see the mindless zombie attacks from those infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome against a president who is (a) keeping his campaign promises; (b) more concerned with being a citizen of America than a citizen of the world; (c) not living in denial about Islam’s toxic reach; and (d) functioning within his constitutionally and legislatively defined spheres of influence, something Obama did not do.<br />
<br />
For those enumerated reasons, I can put up with Trump’s eccentricities, his grating speech patterns, and his boastfulness. I’m focused on what the man is doing and not on (a) the savage, unfounded media attacks against him and (b) his sometimes random, and definitely self-centered, communication style.<br />
<br />
I am getting increasingly fed up to here and beyond having to live with little people obsessed with plastics bags and computer predictions that are consistently proved wrong. Worse, these are the same people who gain “intellectual sustenance” from reporters whom Ben Rhodes, Obama’s 30-something English-major Iran minion, accurately described as “27 years old,” whose “only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” I guess, Ben, it takes one to know one.<br />
<br />
Beginning with the French Revolution, the most damaging people haven’t been the mindless masses. The dangerous ones are the intellectuals who have a smattering of knowledge and are smart enough to convince themselves of anything — especially to convince themselves that there is no god and that they are the ultimate arbiters of morality. They’re the ones who inflame the masses, which is why the first thing a good revolutionary does is slaughter all of the up-and-coming “thinkers.” He knows how dangerous they are. The good ones reveal truth; the stupid thinkers and intellectuals simply insist on their different (and, they argue, better) form of tyranny. Sultan Knish nailed it:<br />
<br />
<img alt="sultan-knish-about-leftist-tyranny" src="https://i2.wp.com/www.bookwormroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Sultan-Knish-about-Leftist-Tyranny.jpg?resize=505,280" /><br />
The people in my world know little, but they have degrees up the yin-yang and are easily able to talk themselves into all sorts of stupid things that bear no relationship to facts, history, or basic human behavior (and biology). Then, having talked themselves into nonsense, they take to the streets in vulva costumes screaming that men are sexist pigs because they view women as the sum total of the sex organs.<br />
<br />
A few months ago, a doctor (a doctor!) earnestly told me that there are more than two genders, adding that he wasn’t just talking about the rare hermaphrodite. Instead, he said, gender is a construct. Pardon me while I barf — preferably barf on him, as a reasonable punishment for allowing his undoubted brainpower to be harnessed not to truth, but to an ideology that is entirely committed to aggregating all power in a government consisting of people just like this doctor: so smart that they no longer feel constrained by reason or facts.<br />
<br />
I think I need some ice cream. Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do when Trump Derangement Syndrome gets you down.</blockquote>
<br />
Rant part II begins here:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
I posted a rant yesterday about how I lost a little bit of control over myself on Facebook when a Progressive friend got hysterical about ICE going after illegal immigrants with additional felonies on their records. I started off with a delicate inquiry about whether she distinguished between legal and illegal immigration. She responded by asking coyly if I meant undocumented immigrants. My rant is here, if you’re interested.<br />
<br />
As this post title warned you, this is an update to that rant. One of her Progressive friends replied to my comments about illegal immigrants being . . . well, illegal, bu going into generic Leftist shtick. I mean, it was right off the template: “I know good people who are undocumented and the children suffer and you’re no Christian if you want to kick them out.”<br />
<br />
Aside from the fact that I am, indeed, no Christian (being Jewish myself), I suddenly saw a red haze when I got that accusatory, “you’re a bad person” Leftist boilerplate. It was at that point . . . and I’m sort of proud to admit this . . . that I went full Alinsky right back at him.<br />
<br />
I haven’t been inclined to sign onto Facebook and see what kind of sh*t rained down upon me after I went full Alinsky about illegal immigration, so can’t quote myself verbatim. I did, however, make three points, complete with in-your-face shaming language aimed at the guy who tried, with no success whatsoever, to shame me.<br />
<br />
My first point was that, behind all that compassion, he is actually complicit in a moral evil when he supports corrupt Latin American governments — the ones that prey on their people — who use illegal immigration as a safety valve. The system he supports means that decent people in Latin America who are devastated because of government corruption and its related economic devastation are actively encouraged to trek through dangerous deserts and sneak into America just so that they can send home billions of American dollars that keep those rotten systems afloat. With the funds illegal immigration brings to Latin America, those governments don’t have to improve. I finished by telling the man he ought to be ashamed of himself, and was quite racist, for being complicit with tyrants.<br />
<br />
My second point was that the rule of law is the only thing that ensures the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In banana republics, which is what a nation ends up becoming without a rule of law, people fare very badly. To the extent this weeping Lefty is actively undermining the rule of law, the result will be that across the spectrum, Americans will see the end of their quality of life and economic well-being. And again, I told the guy that his position is immoral that he should be ashamed.<br />
<br />
My third and final point addressed his “it’s for the children claim.” He, like every other Progressive in the land, he knows a woman who entered America through illegal immigration (he said “without documents”) with her young children, so that the children have spent their whole lives here. (And these, children, of course, aren’t gangbangers, but credits to their race and parentage.) Given these facts (which I don’t believe are personal to him, but that he picked up from Daily Kos), it would be wrong to send the family back to its native country. My answer was that what’s wrong is that a terrible mother gambled with her children’s lives as she did. Don’t blame me.<br />
<br />
What I forgot to add is that, perhaps, when those children who have received the benefit of an American upbringing return to their natal country, they can use that same taxpayer-funded upbringing to improve lives down south. That will be a bigger blessing to poverty in Latin America than giving all those corrupto-crats a constant pass and a flow of cash.<br />
<br />
So, again, shame, shame, shame — but not shame on me. I’m the good gal here. I’m the one that wants Latin American countries to stop having a way to avoid addressing their own serious problems. I’m the one who wants to keep America from turning into a banana republic. We all know that once the rule of law vanishes and we’re reduced to being like those Latin American countries, there’s nowhere to which we can escape. And lastly, I’m the one who thinks we ought to point the finger of shame at those despicable people who turn their own children in criminals and potential fugitives from the law — not to mention making these same children strangers in their own (their Latin American “own”) lands.<br />
<br />
And that, my friends, is how you go full Alinsky on the Left when it comes to illegal immigration.</blockquote>
<br />Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09767954910569442805noreply@blogger.com0